Second, in a series, to make a series, right? We were against around translation, interpreting, and multilingualism. We are really happy to be here now to look at translation as or in scholarship and to be sponsored and this coming together from people from many different colleges. So that's a lot of fun for us and it's exciting. At this time, we also want to start talking a little more in public about something that a very special group of people have been working on in the name of the College of Humanities that's an initiative. The people on the committee who have been in the core think they're in on all of this, although many of you and frankly, probably all of you here have been doing about these sorts of things. Our core group is David Bramley, I'd like to thank you. If he grad, I don't think he's here right now. Terry Polly, if you can wait for me to stand up. Okay, Chantel Warner, I'll tell you where you can stand up. There you are, okay. Sonia Polina, I saw her, there she is, okay. Baby Nalfi, he's up here. And Suzanne Penthrow, who's not quite here yet, really. So I want to thank them. Please round of applause for them. They've done a lot of work. Thank you. We're starting an opening for us. This is kind of our soft, gradual opening of an initiative that will take on more shape as we proceed. We'll call it now the Language, Mediation, Interpreting, and Translation Initiative. In this initiative, we aim to deepen the whole university's long-standing commitment to the study of cross-cultural communication in multilingual and mobile settings. Today's scholars and professionals all across the world really need to skillfully translate, interpret, and mediate between and among languages, as well as between and among speakers, literatures, and cultures from various monolingual and multilingual landscapes, areas, and societies. We also need to be able to understand and research how communities, societies, and regions negotiate their shared civic, ecological, historical, and diplomatic challenges, among many others. The multiple languages all at once, usually. So the College of Humanities, LMIT, we're calling it Language, Mediation, Interpreting, and Translation Initiative. Starts to integrate and apply the rich expertise of scholars and units here on campus. Interpreting, translation, literature, cultural versions of those, media, and applied language studies, in order to address our grand challenges in the global, local, and multilingual society, and on that scale. So I thank you all very much for being here, especially all of our presenters for this panel and the coming panels. I'm excited to listen to all this and thank you for being here. Thanks again to our organizers, and especially the other panelists. And we'll be fasted. At this point, I would like to welcome these five wonderful scholars, local scholars from the University of Arizona, professors Fabian Alfie, Hengar Patas, Scott Wilkes, Gail Brennan, and Susan Stryker. I would like to invite our moderator, Fabian Alfie, to take a very roomy, entire hour to have a conversation with our other speakers today. Thank you, David. We have the work panel number one, which is dealing with the task of the translator in 2013. And we're gonna be wrestling with various questions about how translation we use across culture, the genres, and discourses, and so forth. But I'd like to ask the panelists first to spend a few minutes and talk about each of your, if you could each talk about the work that you do in translation, and how it sort of fits into the overall topic of this discussion. Let's start with Dale. Okay, well, I'm Dale Brennan, and I am with the Office of Ethnophobes. Oh, I need to turn this on, don't I? I'm also a technophobe, so. I work at the Arizona State Museum in the Office of Ethno-Historical Research. And our main goal in that office is to make the Spanish colonial documentary record accessible to scholars and the public alike. One of the ways that we do this is through documentary history projects, in which we will transcribe and translate a selection of Spanish colonial documents with a particular topic in mind. The project that we're working on at the moment, the moment, it's been the last eight years, is the Otham-Pipash Documentary History Project. I think most people probably know who the Otham are, the Tono Otham are neighbors to the West. The Pipash are better known as the Maricopa Indians up in the Phoenix area. Pipash is the term that they use for themselves. And this project entails translating, transcribing, I should say, and translating a large selection of Spanish documents that span a period of more than two centuries in time, from 1645 to 1854. These are not literary works. They are documentation of colonial affairs. They are letters, reports, expedition diaries, census reports, inventories. They involve a wide cast of characters, people from all different parts of Spain, of Mexico with different dialects, different backgrounds. And we have to become familiar with the, not just the handwriting of each individual, but the style of the individual as well. But our focus really is not so much on the style of the document as much as the information that it holds pertaining to, in our case, the Otham and Pipash. What we're interested in is what information can we, what descriptions are in these documents about these two cultures. We look for information regarding settlement patterns, subsistence, material culture, social customs, ethnic and linguistic identities, relationships among various groups, roles in historical events, and responses to missionization and Spanish colonization. So it struck me that the first part of the title for this symposium struck me. In others' words, it has for us kind of a double relevance in that we are working to make the Spanish colonial documentary record comprehensible to an English speaking audience. That's the first charge. But in the process of doing so, we're also trying to understand the Otham and Pipash experience of Spanish colonization, except that that experience is relayed through Spanish words, through the words of others with a capital O. Otham have a word that is olb, meaning other. So that would be in the words of olb. The irony does not escape us on this. But native peoples of the region did not have written languages, and for the most part, we're unable to read or write. So we are relegated to relying on the Spanish colonial record, which is inherently biased. It's Eurocentric. We do get native voices sometimes, very rarely, but they're almost always filtered and often distorted in that process. So how do we mitigate this? What we have opted to do is focus on tribal consultation, and we are currently involved in a collaboration with representatives from the Otham Nations Cultural Center and Museum. Our colleagues there have put together a group of elders, a discussion group, and we are then transcribing, they have worked with us in making a selection of documents and identifying research questions that they have. We are then transcribing documents, translating them into English, putting them into some kind of historical context for them, and providing this group, this discussion group, copies of the translations that they then read and discuss among themselves. The idea being to get feedback from them, commentary on what they're reading, that we can incorporate ultimately into our published versions. What we're shooting for is not so much, incorporating it ourselves, but actually getting written contribution from them, stating their perspective on these documents. The other way that we can mitigate is through critical use of other sources of data. Such as ethnographic information, archeological information, paleo-environmental information, this all works its way in. And I think that pretty well covers it for the moment. Thank you, Dale. Fascinating person. And before we get started, Jaime had a new arrival this week on Monday. Bling, bling, bling. Diego was nine pounds, eight ounces, is that right? Seven ounces. Okay, close enough.  I'm surprised you're awake. Bling, bling, bling, bling. Yeah, it has been a wonderful experience, really. But the credit goes to my wife, Laura, who is the one who carried it out. And, yeah. Well, that's a little. It would be a lot worse if you had to do that. Yes, exactly. It will be a first, too. But she's been fantastic and she had to put a long struggle. But everything came out wonderfully. Thank you very much. Fascinating. Diego. Diego. Diego, yeah. Diego Lewis, actually, because we were looking for names that work well in both languages, so. All right, well, fascinating project. What I would like to do is to present several recent projects that I've been involved with, and serial translations, but I also would like to talk a little bit about my work as an interpreter. And, David, I think that you have some links there to the, some recently published books that I had, the privilege of translating, and being involved with. First one is Cave City and Eagle's Nest, that is an interpret, an interpretive journey through the map of Quentin Chan number two. This is the culmination of an international project several years in the making and a series of conferences organized by the Moses Mesoamerican Archive that focused on 16th century pictorial manuscript known as the map of Quentin Chan number two. It's an extraordinary document that contains over 700 images and symbols relating the story of the emergence and migration of the Chichimec people in central Mexico. It is a document that tells about the community's history and the claim over the surrounding landscape and many other occurrences along the way. When I say the claiming about the surrounding landscape is because this document dates from 1540, barely two decades after the fall of the Second Empire and it was prepared by the Lords of the House of the Eagle as a legal document in order to preserve their heritage and to claim their rights over the surrounding land from which they were being dispossessed. The map recently underwent extensive physical analysis and conservation and systematic photographic survey at the Museo Anthropológico de Mexico and the restoration has been really fantastic. It is, I have copies of the book here that will be for display later on but hopefully you can see the Spanish version of the book that will be the second link and hopefully you can see it in the screen right now. It is a project of the Rockefeller Foundation for Latin America and the editors have been Professor David Carrasco from Harvard University and Scott Sessions from University of Massachusetts at Amherst and it has been published by the New Mexico University Press. It has been reviewed by the New York Review of Books as one of the feature outstanding publications of the year and I was involved in the project and I translated eight of the 15 essays that made the book. The second project that I completed recently is a very different animal. It's the title and that will be the third and fourth links there, David. It's Spanish culture behind barbed wire, memory and representation of the French concentration camps 1939, 1945. This is a book by Francie Kate Aris who is a Professor of Hispanic Studies at the College of William and Mary in Virginia and this book tells the story of tens of thousands of Spanish Civil War refugees who were held in German camps in France during the period immediately following the end of the Civil War. It was a massive exodus and over 250 former Republicans were imprisoned in concentration camps in the land of Liberté, Valité and Fraternité. This is not a very well-known historical episode that needed research and documentation and Professor Kate Aris combines close textual analysis of former inmates' diaries, poetry, drama and fiction with a carefully researched historical perspective and he explores the process of cultural reconstruction that takes place and that begins behind this, the barbed wire of these concentration camps and that ultimately will encode the physical spaces, the ethos and the aesthetics of the later subversion, resistance and political agency that takes place as a position to the dictatorship that the new order brought into the country. I think this is a book of particular interest for scholars and students of exile studies Spanish Civil War history and so. It received an honorable mention at the Modern Language Association and it has been, my translation has been published by Anthropos in Spain and Ciglo Vintuno in Latin America. I also translate regularly for Cuauhtlibet that is the, I would say the leading magazine in music theory in the Spanish language that is published by the University of Alcala being cooperating with them for a number of years and more recently I translated a number of chapters from different books from the Cambridge companion to music on Strauss, Mozart, contemporary music and so on. And that, as a translator, those are some of the most salient projects of the last two years but I also am working, I'm a working interpreter, I'm a fairly certified interpreter, I'm a legal interpreter, so I interpret regularly in the federal court and I'm also a medical interpreter and a conference interpreter and I want to talk a little bit about my work as an interpreter because interpretation really is oral translation. Well actually translation is written interpretation because we always put the emphasis on translation because of the prestige that translation has but if we look at interpretation in terms of the historical record and the number of people who relay in order to preserve their identities and their cultures on interpretation on oral communication it really is a much more salient and a much more important means of course cultural communication that translation in many senses not in all. So I'm very fond and very proud of my work as an interpreter which requires also a different set of skills, translation, you have to preserve all the content, you have to be very mindful of the voice of the author of the academic and scholarship record. In interpretation the premium is more in providing and accept our equivalent on the spot. Therefore your cognitive and more skills have to be very well integrated in order to be able to process sometimes what is an onslaught of incoming data at rates of over 300 words per minute in very, very high technical registers in places where the stakes are very high too like courthouses, hospitals, immigration centers and so on. So I think that that's a very, very, very important part of the world of translation. Thank you. Scott? I was hoping I wouldn't have to follow you because I'm really an amateur translator about six years ago. So I noticed that an institute called the Royal Adelaide Institute in Amman, Jordan was sponsoring a series of translations of Quran commentaries. And they were doing it in such a way that the basic translation was available online so free to everybody. Whereas the annotated edition was published by a not-for-profit spirituality-oriented bookstore publisher called Frans Vite, I believe in Kentucky. And so I asked, oh, are you working on a certain commentary by one of the earliest large commentaries by a man known as a Tabori conventionally? He has a much longer name. Who lived in Baghdad most of his life. One of the most prominent religious scholars of the late ninth and early 10th centuries. And the email reply from a person whose name I recognized that we had never met was, would you like to do it? And I said, oh, well, I wasn't asked for a CV, a sample of a previous translation. There are a lot of red flags that probably should have come up earlier in this large project. But I said, oh, what the heck, you know, I guess what could go wrong with the 10th century Quran commentary. He's not gonna be offended, you know, so that's okay. So it's a 30 volume book. But of course, I did not commit to 30 volumes. I'd made sure they wanted me to do, I had some ideas for what I would do. They had some ideas for what I would do and they were paying. So I did what they wanted, which is often the case when you're getting paid. And their selection was very nice. They didn't want any of the controversial verses in the Quran. They wanted nice verses and surahs that have various blessings associated with them. So I said, you know, first time round, why not? We'll just do this. I'd read most of the, no, I'd read some of the passages they wanted me to translate, others I hadn't. I knew the chapters of the Quran, but I didn't know what the commentary actually said. But I figured it would probably be interesting and so they want me to do in three years, about five to 600 pages. This was when I was an assistant professor on tenure track. And I said maybe four years and they said, okay. And they gave me more money. I don't know why they did that, but I guess they figured it was another year of work. It was supposed to have been done a year or two ago. Due to some very unforeseen and tragic circumstances, I became department head. Me becoming department head wasn't the tragic part, but what led to me becoming department head was the tragic part. And certainly advice, if you're planning on doing a major translation project, I would recommend against becoming department head if you can avoid that. Or just, you know, fortunately, they've been very understanding. So my next due date was last September for the project, which needless to say, I have a complete draft, but as you all know, it's best not to publish a draft. Even if it's online, it's still best not to publish a draft, probably even better not to publish a draft. So that's been an interesting challenge. The project is challenging for other reasons. I've noticed that certain poems and other Arabic texts get translated three or four times, and I imagine it's a little easier if your work has been translated by one or two people before you. Even if it's into, say, French or German instead of into English, it gives you a little help. This text has a few scattered fragments have been published in abridged versions that are sometimes more confusing due to the apparatus of the abridgment than the actual Arabic texts. So this is a totally unpublished text. There are only about a million of these in the Islamic tradition that have yet only a few hundred at most texts have been translated, at least Arabic texts in the Islamic tradition into English. So it's been an exciting challenge. What makes it, and maybe someone can talk about two, because I'd love to find out I've been doing the wrong thing for the last four years. When you're translating a commentary on a text, you're really translating two texts. You're translating the original texts, which in this case happens to be the most sacred book for Muslims, the Quran, and then the commentator's interpretation of it. And so the question is, should the translation of the Quran reflect what the commentator thought it meant, or what I think it means, or what someone who knows more about the Quran thinks it means. So that's a challenge I've been wrestling with. This comes out most dramatically in the very famous, one of the most famous verses of the Quran is usually called the throne verse, in which there's a reference to God's throne, and it's the only time this word, Kursi, now Kursi just means chair in Arabic, but it means something, well, it means a bunch of things. According to my commentator, though it doesn't mean throne. So now I have the problem of translating the throne verse, which he thinks actually means knowledge. So it's now the knowledge verse. So how does that work? Well, fortunately, we have footnotes at least in the annotated edition, so I can say this is normally considered the throne verse, even though this commentator doesn't think it means throne at all. So these are some of the challenges, in addition to just the sheer scope, the magnitude, the foolishness I perhaps went into this project, the lack of great examples, proceeding in at least from Arabic into English. But as anything kind of crazy, it's a lot of fun, and hopefully, inshallah, as we say, God willing, it'll get done by next September. Thanks. Well, I'm even more nervous than you going after the three of you because I think David asked me to be on this panel. I think because it says, how is translation mediated across cultures, genres, and discourses in ways that may not be easily recognizable? I'm in the not easily recognizable part because I don't really do translation at all. So why am I even here?  So I am the founding co-editor of a journal called TSQ, Transgender Studies Quarterly, which is really trying to help consolidate the field of transgender studies, looking at any manifestations and expressions of gender and gender identity, not call our attention to the sort of unnaturalness and constructiveness of gender, the variability of gender across cultures, the emergence of new gender categories. And so we, because we're envisioning this as a truly international publication, we're having to deal not only with the usual questions of like, how do you reach a global audience and not just an Anglophone audience, but this very concept transgender is very Anglophone in the way that it's constructed. Partly because gender itself as a category is a very Anglophone concept. So what I thought I would do is just a quick little capsule history of the idea of gender, the gender concept itself, and how it's moved across different, as it says here on the page, moved across different cultures, genres, and discourses, so that the way that the concept of gender came to be used in English is shockingly recent.  Sex is what gonads do you have and gender is how do you express a sense of masculinity or femininity. But that distinction was not made in English until the middle of the 20th century. And where it actually started was in medical discourse. There was a man by the name of John Money who was a psycho neuro endocrinologist at Johns Hopkins University. And his work involved working with people that were once called hermaphrodites, now are called intersex, sometimes are called having disorders of sex development. But basically people born with ambiguous genitals, not clearly male or female.  What's the relationship between their sense of self as like fitting into a social category versus their physical anomalies? And he was trying to come up with some concept or term that would explain this thing that he saw, the distinction between a sense of self and a form of body. And he thought, oh, there is a word that kind of means this, it's the concept of gender that we can take from language, just that gender just being a relatively arbitrary classification of nouns. It's like a noun has a gender and it doesn't really relate to anything except it's this category, not that category. So that Money brought the concept of gender, translated gender, I guess you could say, from linguistics to medicine. It moves from Money then talking about what he called gender orientation. That was his first, he didn't use gender by itself as a term, he talked about gender orientation.  That is which category does an organism think it belongs to? Which gender is it oriented towards? And then this gets picked up from neuroendocrinology by psychiatry. Mostly, first of all, a psychiatrist at UCLA by the name of Robert Stoller. And Stoller develops this three-part model of human subjectivity. There's the biological sex, there's the gender identity, which is like the sense of how a person identifies themselves as being a man or a woman, which is usually congruent with biological sex, but doesn't have to be. And then third, there's gender role. So that is, how do you express your, how do you express your psychological identity through your social behaviors? So this three-part thinks, sex, gender identity, gender role. It then moves from psychiatry into feminism.  Precisely what Simone de Beauvoir was writing about in the second sex. She says one is not born a woman, but rather one becomes one. You know, the idea that a biological sex shouldn't force you into any particular social category and that the idea of gender or social role being something that's socially constructed and transformable, that feminists saw the idea of gender as analytically and politically useful. So it moves out of psychiatry into feminism. And then from feminism, it enters into social sciences in the academy primarily through feminist social scientists who are saying no, studying gender inequality is an important part of the social sciences. You can study the sociology of gender and the history of gender and the psychology of gender. And so that gender then moves as an analytical concept moves into broader academic discourse and becomes one of the major analytical categories like race or like class. So anyway, I can talk a little bit more about how based on this concept of gender you start developing ideas of transgenders and then the difficulties of applying that concept of transgender across cultures where the very concept of gender doesn't actually fit with how people in different cultures think about the relationship between their body, their social role, their sexuality and their identity. So lots of sort of second order problems come up when I'm trying to talk about transgender. But I'll stop there. Thank you. Our basic question that the panel is gonna be discussing is how is translation mediated or how does translation mediate across cultures, genres and discourses? But we can talk about culture in many different ways, whether we're talking about historical cultures or cultures over time, translating from the original to a new language or in the case of daily you're dealing with one, the ton of to Spanish to English. I mean, there's several things, but also over the course of two centuries. And just to set this up, I wanted to just mention one thing as I was thinking about this panel, which is the Latin root of the word translation, which is translazio, which comes from moving from one side to another from one area to another. However, we define that area, whether it's a group or one language area or even a historical period to another. So I'm just gonna toss that out. And if you all want to interact with each other, that would be even better. How does translation mediate across cultures as you've seen it? Well, the VCs are gigantic. Yes, it is. 15 minutes. So, somebody wants to start. Well, I came across a very exciting anecdote and I just thank you, David, for inviting me so I can share with someone other than my immediate family. But it just so happens, here's a little question. Does anyone know what is possibly the first English book published on a printing press in England in 1477? It's not the Bible. Sorry. It's not the Quran, thank you. That would be truly awesome. That would have really made my day. But anyone know? It's a book called The Dix, Dix and Sayings of the Philosophers, which is a Middle English translation of a late 14th century French translation of a 13th century Latin translation of an early 13th century Spanish translation of an Arabic book written in either 1048 or 1049 called Mokhtar al-Hikm wa Mahasin al-Kalim, the choicest aphorisms and best sayings by a man named Mubashir bin Fattik in Egypt, which claims to contain the wisdom and exhortations of ancient Greek philosophers. You got that? It wasn't a best seller. As the recent editor said, despite his popularity in the 15th century, the text had almost no impact on later English writing. I believe the chief reason is that then as now, Dix and Sayings is a very unwieldy text. However, on the Islamic studies side, where of course this is a little bit maybe more exciting than in the English department side of things, Franz Rosenthal, who spent a lot of time studying this, one of the great Orientalists in the non-pejorative sense of Orientalism, one of the real masters of philology and texts, quotes all these translations with the possible exception of the Provençal edition, about which we know little, were landmarks in the literary intellectual history of the Western European nations. Over a period of 300 years, they were used and read by the best minds. So clearly two different interpretations of the impact of this translation. And then what struck me the most is that in 2006, this text was re-edited in the Middle English and published without any consultation of anyone who knows Arabic. The Arabic text was published in 1958. Unfortunately, Rosenthal was about to publish it when an Egyptian beat him to the punch. And so he wrote an article saying, this would have been the preface to my edition of this text, but this Egyptian scholar who's very good published in it, and so I don't have to do that anymore any longer. But nonetheless, I just happened to find a little time to skim a few pages, and the differences are quite substantial. So when the new editor writes that it's essentially the same text as the Arabic, that's totally incorrect from the, maybe 20 pages I had time to skim in the last few weeks. Anyway, these kinds of connections are not ones we often think about. We hear about translation movements here and there, but here you see this really dramatic case of a book that isn't even really about Muhammad or the Quran. It's about what happened supposedly in Greece and the Near East going all the way around through Spain, Latin all the way to Marriott, England. It's a very interesting proposition, almost as complex and as vast as the question, the first question for this colloquium. Issues of, besides the languages and the cultures and the time expanse and the chronology, issues of interpretation, agency, vicariousness, subjectivity coming to place. So the big question here I think is the strategy that I've been looking for in order to answer this question is what can we do as a society in order to make sure that all these perspectives, opinions, views have a way to participate and to express themselves. Among other things, bringing into these discourse, bringing into these dialogue all the constituents, all these stakeholders, so they can themselves look at their own issues and voice their own opinions and then have a meaningful dialogue. So I think that in order to foster the discourse of translation and interpretation in multilingual and multicultural societies and globalization has brought so much interaction into the realm. I think that we really have to look for advanced social policies that guarantee equal access and that foster, that implement policies that foster equal access and representation and cover the spectrum of ideological positions. That's something that Professor Ajit mentioned today in his lecture this morning because there are so many interests or many competing interests and competition is good. But the first thing that we need to have is to have a setup, a social setup, a political setup that really gives a voice to all the participants. So I think that in order to see how translation has mediated across cultures, one of the things that we can learn from translation is that when the different groups, the different languages, the different cultures really know how to access, they cannot participate in discourse. There is a lot of conflict that arises. So we can learn from the past and as a modern society, what we can do is just to make sure that we implement policies that open the door and that give a voice to all those people who are part of our societies. So we will not have to deal with problems of not having really a record that gives a voice to people who only have an oral tradition as a literary tradition because it is not being taken into account if we really don't pay attention to those groups or those languages to those traditions that are not part of the written record of translation, purely speaking. So I think that the first thing that we have to do is to make sure that we have the social mechanisms, the political mechanisms that respect this diversity and that foster these dialogue among people who speak different languages and have different cultures. What would you recommend? What would you think of as some of the deficiencies as you've seen them? Would you care to elaborate? We have a number of federal standards, for instance, like Title VI that actually are very specific as to giving access to people on the basis of avoiding discrimination on the basis of cultural differences, specifically from government agencies that we see federal funds. These Title VI, that is something that comes up out of the social struggle for civil rights in the 50s and the 60s, declares it to be the policy of the United States that discrimination on the ground of race, color, and national origin and language is implicitly comprehended and there is much jurisprudence that makes linguistic meaningful participation part of national identity and national origin shall not occur in connection with programs and activities that receive federal funding. So for instance, Native American groups should be brought also because of historical reasons into any dialogue, any initiatives that take into account the voice, the language, the culture, and the history of the lands where they have been living for thousands of years. Groups that are representative or that are significant for their numbers or in those venues that are fundamental for their well-being of a person that are considered basic rights like it could be legal settings, access to justice, access to healthcare, and so it is a federal mandate right now by Title VI and also by Executive Order 13166 that is an order that came out during the Clinton presidency that those institutions that receive federal funding have to provide those type of services. In general, it is my belief that society that is the fastest respect dialogue that is mindful of these diversity and respectful and implements the means to facilitate this dialogue among languages and cultures is a society that brings concord into the realm and that forces a peaceful cohabitation and that also is beneficial socially, politically, economically, and of course culturally, and that gives rise to a whole sort of movements that have to do with culture, with expression, with freedom, with literatures, with oral traditions that are very enriching of the social experience. So we already have many instruments in place, many policies that we oftentimes fail to implement as a society and we learn about it by them and I can give you some specific examples but I don't wanna take all the time because I'm sure that my colleagues... Well, you mentioned the oral tradition and the written tradition and one of the things that strikes me at hearing all four of you is the dialogic nature whether we're talking about the English translations of the Spanish colonial documents of the Taunautum practices and so forth, whether it's the oral interpretation or whether we're even talking about the commentary of the Quran and the problems. I mean, would you all care to look into that? I mean, there is a, as you mentioned Scott, for instance, the idea of which one do you translate? Do you translate the Quran as he understood it? I mean, how do you approach that? Yeah, well, anytime you translate the Quran, one should be pretty careful, especially if it's going to be put online, potentially, as I mentioned. Yes, one should be careful. I mean, fortunately, we do have things like footnotes and you can kind of, I mean, what you also wanna avoid is writing a commentary on the commentary on the text, because that'll add another 10 years to this project and I don't think they'll be as charitable 10 years from now as they are now, as well as the great distance, of course, which helps. But I think, I mean, there are just these huge issues of, at least in our field, which text do you begin to translate as a representative sample? Do you need to have a representative sample or you just pick texts that you enjoy? There are issues of the style of these texts. They include lots of names that nobody today really cares about, but for someone like me or who's interested in this period, these are very important names. Each individual who's quoted has some significance. So that's important. And then, of course, the value, and I encourage, I mean, I hope I haven't discouraged anyone from trying to translate a Quran commentary, although I could see why they might come to that conclusion. But we get asked all the time, what does the Quran say about X? Or what does Islam say about X? Which, of course, you just say, what does Germany say about Y? I mean, no one, I think, says that. But these are the kinds of questions we face all the time. And it's handy to say, well, there's diversity of opinion, but it's all in Arabic and so you can't read it. And I don't have time to tell you or I haven't read it myself. So there's a great value, I think, especially given the tensions between parts of the Muslim world in the United States, various assumptions. I was at an interfaith kind of event the other day where the assumption, you know, this man thought he had it all figured out that the Muslim world, by which he met the Arab world, which is totally two very different things, was stuck in the 1500s and now they're trying to get to 2000. These kinds of ideas, if we can show, actually some of the, probably the best Marxists in the 20th century were Arabs. I mean, that might not please this gentleman, but they weren't in the 15th century, right? This is something, a gross misunderstanding of what's going on. So it has a crucially valuable for any, as I think it's underrepresented group, I think, much of the Muslim world, despite being large population-wise, in terms of one's curriculum growing up in the United States or elsewhere, one learns very little and, unfortunately, one learns a lot from the media, which is frequently less than accurate. So it has a crucial role in mediating, I think, between that, but it is very time-consuming and there are not a lot of us who have positions that allow us, at least some of the time, to do these kinds of things. And I've got some suggestions as to how to proceed with this difficult situation. There are not many published translations that you can use, but there are certainly a few dozen. So having access to the historical record of previous translations and also the commentaries and how those have been received and which are the values, because there are a few that emerge as they're really the milestones and the most representative during those times. Also, you have to engage in an etymological analysis. You have to proceed with an interlinear, literal translation and then start interpreting that in terms of context, depending when the text watch also prepare, there are many historical and cultural circumstances that have to be taken into account to see how the meaning has evolved or devolved from that time on connotation also other examples within other traditions, you know, sacred texts from other traditions that have the Bible studies, the Bible is the book that has been accounts with the largest number of translations. And also, and I think this is crucial, consult with other translators. People who have experience in the field and then once you have a good sketch, a good draft of what you want to do and your strategy is then you send to somebody who you trust, or a community of translation and they say, look, I'm working on this and sometimes your colleagues really give you a lot of input.  I need my homework and actually many of the well-respected scholars in the field agree with these approaches and so on. The thing that strikes me listening to all four of you is there's a commonality among the work you're doing which is this notion of, I mean, it's not just translating from culture to culture or language to language, but also historically whether we're talking about, I mean, again, daily you're covering two centuries and certainly the practices, both of the people writing and of the people they're describing were changing over time. Susan, you also mentioned the evolution of the word gender and that too and Scott as well with the first book in English. I mean, that is a different set of problems. That is how do you approach the fact that whatever it is you're working on has a history as well. Yeah, just another example that comes out of some of my work, one of the main historical figures that I'm doing research on is this woman named Christine Jorgensen who was the first globally famous sex-changing person and that the word transsexual was coined largely in relationship to her. That the practice predated the word for it and that the name came about as a way to try to distinguish people who use surgery and hormones to change their body, to change their social and legal identity in a way that distinguished them from homosexuals or from cross-dressers or many of these other transgender terms. And part of what I'm looking at in Jorgensen's career is that as a person from the US who gets called this word that gets coined in the US and yet she's truly globally visible, how is it that this term and this identity category and this particular mode of doing one's body, how is it received in different cultures and languages around the world because it means something different every place it lands. I've done some work on a film that was made in the Philippines in the early 1960s in which Christine Jorgensen has an extended cameo role in this film and even though I don't think it's what the filmmakers were thinking when they made the film for me as a cultural studies person, I see this very complicated dialogue going on about how the word transsexual is being received and how it relates to currently existing terms for sexuality and gender identity. The film is called Kaming Muga Taliada, a.k.a. We Who Are Sexy that it was, had both a Tagalog or Filipino title as well as an English translation and that word Taliada, which was translated as sexy, that Taliada was a slang word that basically meant it was considered a euphemism for the word bakla, that bakla is a very pejorative word, basically it means like faggot, but that Taliada would be something like sissy that it was, but it's translated as sexy into English and what the root of the word meant, it came from the Spanish tayar, like to cut, right? And so it literally means someone who's cut and that idiomatically it meant like someone who cuts a nice figure, somebody who has a nice shape, but when it's used about a woman, Taliada it's considered it's a form of praise, it's a form of praise, but when you sculpt it, right, you know, but when it's used about a male person, it's considered pejorative, but it has all the connotations then of being aesthetic without being functional, it has a connotation of being artificially contrived like a sculpture rather than natural and organic, it has the connotation of being emasculated. And so you have all of these words or all these associations around the word Taliada and then how does the transsexual come into this? It's like it brings a different set of connotations to being cut, to being emasculated, to being non-functional and so the translation of the transsexual into this existing category, Taliada, it means something very different in the Filipino context than it did in an English language context. And so this film then becomes a mediation on how a US derived term is taken up in existing categories of sexuality and gender identity in the Philippines in ways that different kinds of national imaginaries get worked out around the introduction of this US character. So the film really is a translator. The film is a translator. The film is a translator, it's like it's figuring out how you fit the transsexual into Bacla and Taliada. And there's even more complicated things going on in the film about how it is that Filipino ideas of being Taliada are compatible with nationalist ideas, that it's like a man could be Taliada and still marry and have children. The Taliada characters of the film, besides Christine Jorgensen, all wind up serving in the military. So they serve the nation and the state and the family in many different ways, but to become transsexual, to be physically cut in this American way, rather than being culturally feminine, it doesn't reproduce the nation in the same way. So there's a way that Filipino national identity is warding off on the one hand an American, US American construction of stuff. And at the same time, they're fighting against a moral insurgency where they're doing sexuality and gender another way that's represented as being an internal feminine Islamicized threat to the nation. The nation as the fatherland or as the motherland. For sure. And that's very interesting. And I see why David invited you to be part of this panel because it's really phenomenal. I mean, I see so many parallelisms and gets me thinking about many of the things that you are saying. If Mr. Moderator, we don't have much time and there is a second question here that is an interesting question that is, what are the current conditions for translating and the represented literatures, histories and cultures? There's a couple of things that I would like to say about that if you allow me to. I think that we can summarize that. My answer to that question has better than before, but it's still very bad. So those are the current conditions for translating and the represented literatures, histories and cultures. But specifically, I would like to do a little meta-commentary here as to particular culture that is the translation culture or the culture of translators, which in my opinion is underrepresented, is an underrepresented culture in academia. I would like to encourage all of you to read if you haven't read it. The letter, the article that Catherine Porter who was the president of the Modern Language Association wrote in the year 2009 advocating for translation and its importance within the humanities and also advocating for the practice of translation and interpretation within comparative literatures and the language department. We also are discussing here written translation and I mentioned before that all translation interpretation is very important in my opinion. Also interpretation is underrepresented within the field of translation studies. So I think that those are actually the Modern Language Association I was invited in the year 2007 to give a talk precisely on this topic and there is a task force that put together a document that it is a very interesting piece of research that really illustrate why translation and interpretation should be a very important part in language department in the humanities. So. In fact, you anticipated my last question which is exactly that which is in terms of the, at the academic and in academic life translation traditionally, typically at least in the humanities, it's not unimportant but it's usually lesser than some other forms of scholarship and how do we address that? You have to grab people and shake them and metaphorically speaking of course. Make them understand what we're doing. It's something that I've run up against personally but when you're saying that you're, you spent eight years translating 93 documents or document groups, people, it has no meaning to them. They have no idea what's involved and what do you mean that this first version, this draft is not good? You know what? Scott mentioned you don't want a public draft. Scott mentioned you don't want to. So it's just, I don't know how we do it other than just try to explain to people what it is that we're doing. And if I may go beyond, I think that within translation and comparative linguistics, the practice is also marginalized compared to theoretical studies. There's much more importance to the theory of translation and interpretation which is of course very, very important but I think that the best possible world is when you bring the theory and the practice together and you establish a cross meaningful cross communication so one can inform the other. And that is not happening. I think that we need to make people somehow understand that we are not translating text in a void. You know, it's not, we have to put it into its context. We have to do a lot of research to understand ourselves as well as help our readers understand the motivations behind that reading or that writing, how it was presented, why it was presented that way. And everything else, the impact of this piece of writing on the people in our case of the time. Well, I think we're at the end of our time. Please join me in thanking the panelists. Thank you.


Hello and welcome to International Daily Roundup by People's Dispatch, where we bring you major news developments from around the world, our headlines. Indonesian parliament passes special autonomy law for Papua despite protests. Undocumented migrants in Belgium reach 54th day of hunger strike for regularization. Strike at Walward Drugs plant ends after company imposes tentative offer in the US. And in our video section, we take a look at the impact of existing inequities on COVID-19 vaccine access. In our first story, the Indonesian parliament passed a revised autonomy law for the Papuan provinces on July 15th, called the Papua Special Autonomy Bill or OSTOS. The legislation revised 20 articles from a 2001 law. The law has been widely opposed by people in Papua and West Papua, who have stated that they were excluded from consultations. Moreover, several public discussions organized around the bill were suppressed by the police. People have now denounced the laws in attempt by the Indonesian government to exert more control over the region. Meanwhile, the government has claimed little advance healthcare education and affirmative education policies. Indonesia took over the Papuan region following a UN supervised vote in 1969 that included only around 1,025 people. Over the years, there has been a growing struggle in the area for self-determination. People are also demanding the release of imprisoned Papuan activists, including Victor Yemo. Several student-led demonstrations against the autonomy law were held in the city of Jayapura on Wednesday. However, these were dispersed by armed police and at least 23 people were arrested and four were injured. Among them were students and activists, with the group Petisi Rakyat Papua. Protests were held on several cities, again on Thursday as the law was tabled in parliament. Human rights lawyer Veronica Corman reported that around 50 students were arrested and beaten up in Jakarta. Protests were also held in the cities of Timika and Monakwari, where people gather on the road outside the University of Papua. Protesters had previously tried to march to local government offices, but were blocked by the police. In Angkor, Belgium, where around 470 undocumented workers have been in a hunger strike for 54 days, they are demanding legal recognition and access to work and social services for migrants in the country. They are also demanding clarity on the extraordinary circumstances that would grant them legal residency. After months of protests, the undocumented migrants launched a hunger strike on May 23. Since then, they have occupied a church in Brussels and the campuses of the ULB and VUB universities. Most of the migrants came to Belgium from Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt and Pakistan. Many have lived in the country for over 5 to 15 years. However, when COVID lockdowns were imposed, they lost their jobs and could not avail any pandemic relief programs. UN special rapprochure, Olivia Descheter, has also pointed to a lack of proper housing and widespread homelessness. At present, there are around 4.8 million undocumented workers in Europe of these 150,000 live in Belgium. With the hunger strike reaching its second month, the health of the migrants has continued to worsen. Medics have reported heart and kidney problems, emaciation and even suicide attempts during this time. However, the secretary of asylum and migration, Sami Mehdi, has so far refused the demands. The migrants currently occupying a church have refused all aid, including doctors. A meeting was held between government officials and the union of undocumented migrants for regularization or USPR. However, an agreement has not yet been reached. Meanwhile, protesters have continued to gather in the area in support of their cause. In our next story, we look at the United States where over a five week long strike by Volvo trucks workers is now ended. The United Auto Workers Union announced on July 14 that the third tentative agreement offered by the company had been ratified. Over 2,900 workers in the plant in Virginia had resumed a strike early in June to demand a fair contract. This was after the rejected two previous contracts offered by Volvo trucks North America. This was after the rejected two previous contracts offered by Volvo trucks North America by a majority of over 90%. Workers found that these deals would increase out of pocket health care costs and cut back on retiree benefits. A major concern was also the tiered wage system, which saw huge disparities between recent hires and workers with seniority. Another issue was the alternative work schedule, which included 10-hour shifts in alternative operations. A third tentative deal was set to be set to vote on July 9. The company claimed to eliminate the tiered wage system. The six-year contract also included a wage progression for recent hires and a 14% increase in starting pay. The company offered to put all employees hired on a before June 30, 2015 on top pay and no increase in health insurance premium. However, the deal was rejected by a majority of 60%. The company then announced that it was its last and best offer and it would not bargain further. The UAW held a second vote for the deal on July 14. The common language of the contract passed with 50.3% of the votes. Meanwhile, the hourly language passed by a narrow margin of 17 votes. However, the section covering salaried workers failed with 54 no votes and 40 years votes. Despite this, the UAW called off the strike late on Wednesday. All workers are now mandated to return to work on July 19. Struggle in Virginia has been going on since April and is among the largest labor disputes in the US at the moment. And for our final story, we look at the persistence of unequal vaccine access across the world. Even as Western countries have managed to inaugurate large sections of the population, serious gaps have remained. Research has shown that undocumented migrant workers are disproportionately represented in COVID-19 cases and deaths. Factors such as overcrowded and unsafe housing and precarious working conditions have put migrants at greater risk. Meanwhile, lack of official documents has also meant that they are unable to access health care often. A report by the European Center for Disease Control in June showed low vaccine rates among migrants and ethnic minority groups. Meanwhile, some European countries are gradually starting to lift lockdowns and even mandatory masking. Here is Dr. Satish Drath to talk more about this issue. So absolutely, the fundamental, completely unsurprising and depressing truth is that existing inequities are exacerbated in epidemic times. They are exacerbated because people are not counted, as you point out. They are exacerbated because marginalized communities are correctly skeptical of the state and therefore show vaccine hesitancy that is derived from a completely different source than that in affluent anti-science communities. And because their vaccine supply and their vaccine delivery systems are much less reliable and far more patchy. And therefore, single-dose vaccination is likely to be far more common amongst those communities, the marginalized, the undocumented, the disempowered communities. And as we pointed out, the emerging more transmissible variants, even though single doses might well provide for protection against severe illness and death, do not provide for particularly good protection against infection and transmission. And all of this together is creating what we said a few months ago as the situation where there are large communities in which the virus is spreading, abutting vaccinated communities in which virus variants that are being generated in this pool are being tested against the vaccinated communities, so to say. We are inviting the emergence of true vaccine escape variants as a consequence of iniquitous vaccination. I must confess that while I see the so-called scientific rationale in the sense simply that the vaccinated are much less likely to be productively infected, I am deeply, deeply skeptical of this advice for withdrawing completely from epidemic-appropriate behavior. It is one thing to begin to open up both the economy and culture at large. It is another to begin to create a situation where there are two classes of people, the vaccinated who have privileges that the unvaccinated don't. This is particularly important because the unvaccinated are not at all necessarily unvaccinated by choice, especially they are not necessarily unvaccinated as a result of some anti-science, anti-vaxxer perspective, but simply as a consequence of not having had access, not having had structure, not having had opportunity, or being justly suspicious of the state. Under these circumstances to create effectively two classes of privileges is an invitation to worsening inequities. I think it is therefore deeply improper for such advice to include this complete opening up. I can imagine that under some very restrictive and specific circumstances, a permission for the vaccinated and not for the unvaccinated, such as Wimbledon, tennis tournaments, such as football matches, all of this I say with less than serious tone. But I can imagine that there are situations where one might allow a vaccination certificate to give some small privilege. But these are policies that need to be extremely careful, extremely graded, extremely specific, and extremely nuanced if they are not to translate into massive exacerbated inequities. That's all we have time for today. We'll be back tomorrow with more news from around the world. Until then, keep watching People's Dispatch.