Friday, November 23, 2007
It's major news that there's a funded effort to get books into Arabic:
The Kalima (meaning "word" in Arabic) project aims to revive the art of translation across the Arab world and reverse the long decline in Arabic readers' access to major works of global literature, philosophy, science and history.
"The choices reflect what we consider are the real gaps in the Arab library," said Karim Nagy, the founder and chief executive of the project, which was launched yesterday in Abu Dhabi...
...Inspired by Mr Nagy, a literature-loving Egyptian entrepreneur and former McKinsey management consultant now based in Abu Dhabi, Kalima has become an official venture of the Abu Dhabi government. One of the triggers which led to its creation was a widely-circulated statistic from the 2003 UN report into human development in the Arab world. It estimated that more books (about 10,000) were translated into Spanish every year than had been translated into Arabic over the past millennium...
An emailer points out that "This is a nice way of saying that per year only 250 books are translated to Arabic IN THE WHOLE ARAB WORLD and that for years preventing translation was a way to keep Arabs away from western culture, values and education.
In Israel -- a tiny tiny market compare to the Arab world (There are about 200 times more Arab speakers in the world than Hebrew speakers) -- there are several thousand translations per year. (about a dozen new one each day)"
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Muslim governments are getting busy boycotting the upcoming international book fair in Paris over its honoring of Israeli literature. Considering the dearth of book production and translation across the Muslim World, perhaps if these same governments s... Read More
How fascinating. I love the Singer stories and can see how they would appeal but I wonder about the distribution. Will bookstores be willing to put the translations on the shelves? Is there any evidence that the Arabs will read new books? I surely hope there's a great unmet demand.