 مرحبا مثال خير من تايوان وراحبوا بكم قبل أن نبدأ الجلسة مع المشتركين اليوم معنا وحبوا أن وجه انتباهكم إلى وجود الترجمة الفورية اليوم فإذا اللي من أحب أن يستمع إلى الحوار باللغة العربية أو باللغة الإنجليزية وخاصة باللغة العربية الآن ممكن أن تنظروا إلى أسفل الشاشة فتجدونه علامة على شكل كورة أرضية تجدونه ترجمة عربية أو إنجليزية فإذا بتفضلوا أن تستمعوا إلى الحوار بالعربية أرجوكم أن تنظروا إلى الحوار باللغة العربية مرحبا أسفل الجلسة وحبوا أن تنظروا إلى أسفل المشتركين اليوم هذه المشتركة تأتي لكم من ساوات وشيخ زايد بوك أورد الشيخ زايد بوك أورد is one of the words leading prizes dedicated to Arabic literature and culture since 2006 the award has brought recognition, reward and readership to outstanding work by authors, translators, publishers and organizations around the world in 2018 the award also launched a translation grant to help produce more quality Arabic books in translation outside the Arab world ساوات is of course famous for its global reach and commitment to the global south ساوات is a word leading center in the study of the Arab world with a high profile in cultural literary and translation studies there will be a series of four events in April May and June coinciding and leading up to the award announcements in May in these events we will bring together creative writers translators and researchers to talk about the role and place of Arabic culture and literature in today's ever increasing global connectedness these events are advertised already but you can also look them up on ساوات's website keyword شيخ زايد بوك أورد in today's event we focus on translation and culture exchange starting with the idea that translators are cultural ambassadors together we will think about translation why we translate from and into which language and what and how we translate we will also reflect on the choices we make in relation to genre such as poetry fiction cookbooks or philosophy and our approach to translation and the style we adopt more importantly we will think about the thrills and perils of the world of translation the field the market and translation prizes and of course what translation can do to promote culture exchange and global understanding we have with us today three distinguished panelists let me introduce them very briefly then let them speak for themselves نوال نصر الله is a translator for the best of delectable foods and dishes from andalus and al-maghrib she is short listed for the شيخ بوك زايد شيخ زايد بوك أورد in the translation category this year we have also كاثرين هالس a literary translator right and the 2021 recipient of penheim translation fund grant for the translation of haytham and whatadani's things that can can't be fixed and we have with us right professor Wang You Yong professor of arabic language and literature at the Shanghai international study university who translate chinese classics into arabic our events are all bilingual we will speak in both arabic and english but i think نوال myself and kathryn will speak in english and professor Wang will speak in arabic so thought our translator would be busy tonight moving between two languages so let me now come to the format of the event we have about 60 minutes and if pushed we can go beyond by about 15 minutes right and the format to save time right will have two rounds from our panelists right so individual panelists will make an opening statement between five and seven minutes each right and second round once everybody is finished right they will come back and respond to each other in through to five minutes i may come in to ask questions or the speakers the panelists can ask questions as well and once we go through our procedure we'll open the floor to questions and answers please use the question and answer function to send in your questions and we'll pick them up i'll probably read them allowed when it comes to that now before we start right we have some housekeeping issues first of all i already explained this in arabic but maybe i will explain this in english again right there is we provide ساملتانيس translation today and Tareq is behind the scene doing the hard work and if you want to access the event in arabic go down to go to the bottom of your screen and on your right you'll see an icon with the picture of a globe underneath it there's interpretation click on that and then you'll see off arabic or english and just choose the language you wish to listen to right and again please use the question and answer to ask the panelists your questions so without further ado let me turn to our distinguished panelists and we'll start with نوالنسرالله hi thank you thank you let me start by saying that translation came to me as an accidental you know career when i am before coming to the united states in 1990 i used to be a professor at the universities of bagdad and muslim teaching english literature english language but when i came to ira to the states in 1990 of course iraq was in the news all the time and people started asking me what iraqi is 8 this is the other way of connecting with us so i decided i discovered that there were none i decided to write a cookbook on the iraqi cuisine but since of course i have this zeal for for research you know from my career previous career so i decided to make it half a cookbook and have history and and culture so i dug into the the archives and to my surprise i found that i found ancient recipes written in akkadian on its uniform tablets coming back from my my country iraq in بابلون they go back to 1700 other surprises i found that there were two bagdadi cookbooks from the one from the 10th century and one from the 13th century both of them came from bagdad so add more to these i discovered that other cookbooks from the evil times were also written from egypt the lavand andulus and of course and madrid so i you know i worked on these like for six years in order to write my cookbook which came as delight from the garden of eden it took me about you know it's a long time to come and then i decided after finishing this book i decided that that i would translate those arabic cookbooks and that is how my career as a translator started so why cookbooks because i saw in these cookbooks a wealth of information on the arab world during the medieval times when little was known in the west about this region during this period i thought that was a chance for me to through food through its culture to make our arab culture you know better understood by the west so i started with the with the 10th century book book which was a huge book 132 chapters not only that not recipes but it got lots of poems lots of you know food poetry and lots of anecdotes so i said i would translate all these because they also reflect the you know the gastronomic culture the flourishing gastronomic culture at the time so it took me a while to finish this years to finish this and then after that this is the this is the bagdad the cookbook 10th century after that i turned to egypt because egypt after the you know the decline of bagdad due to after the mongol attacks egypt became the center of the arab world and there was a book called kenzil fawad fitan that was also but it was different this time it was only recipes nonetheless it was really a valuable resource for knowing about how food developed in the 14th century and it came out as treasure trove of benefits and variety at the table and then after that i moved westwards and i translated this is my newest work best of delectable foods and dishes so so far i have done three books but they are major ones they are huge books and they are really valuable resources on you know our knowledge of the arab world and i'm proud that i have i was able to to do this and hopefully more are to come thank you so much no one i have more questions for you later i'll keep that for later katherine yeah let's turn to you now thanks that's making me hungry but i'll i'll try and focus and thank you very much wenchin for inviting us and thank you to the شخصيد book awards for helping organize this um yeah i mean wenchin posed us an interesting set of questions to think about when we were you know thinking about how to introduce ourselves and i have to admit that when i came to translation it wasn't because i had a particular mission in mind um something that i wanted to discover or to bring to anglophone readers i came to translation because i love the arabic language i studied arabic and hebroum at university for my undergraduate degree and i am simply in love with semitic languages i think they are a true masterpiece of human civilization they're amazing trilateral roots and derived verb forms anyway that's all a bit nerdy but that's how i first kind of got involved with arabic and began translating things and it's it's still really important to me because always engaging extremely closely with the text itself and making sure i've understood every last detail and that kind of technical rigor is really really really important to me when i translate that's i think paramount but i came to translation in a more practical sense through working on a lot of videos of citizen media videos of the egyptian revolution i was helping uh friends and comrades in egypt subtitle them and i realized what a wonderful challenge translation is subtitling in particular because it's a whole technical task of its own but but translation i really i really enjoyed that and that was how i ended up getting into translation um these days i'm a translator mainly of contemporary literary fiction and as i said having been first just motivated by my love of language it's only kind of over the course of my career that i've come to think more about why i translate and what i think is important about it and why i keep doing it and i think it really gets to the heart of kind of quite big philosophical questions about the self and the other and who we are and who other people are and how we relate to them um i hear um i often hear translators talking about the idea of you know introducing one culture to another or bringing bringing sort of unknown facts and experiences about the other to anglophone readers and in some senses i agree with that and that's that's a valuable task but i think when we're engaging with with art and literature produced by something we see as the other we're also finding out about ourselves and there's something very important to me about that combination and that tension between discovering new things discovering unfamiliar things and recognizing also the familiar and rethinking the familiar so that's always very important to me um when i'm thinking about what i want to translate and when i'm even thinking about how to translate um and i think a couple of yeah a couple of the recent projects i've i've worked on a that that's that's really been the driving force behind them um one thing i've just finished it's not published yet and i'm looking for a publisher so if you're interested get in touch is a translation of this wonderful book it's very shiny so i don't know if you can see the title it's called محاولة تدكر وشي which is by an egyptian well she's a filmmaker primarily and uh an artist called سلمة تارزي but i also think she's an amazing amazing writer it's written in egyptian vernacular and it's about family it's about losing a parent it's about losing grandparents and it's about growing up and bereavement and depression and it's about really quite universal subjects that i think anybody can can identify with certainly i have been able to but of course it has a very um very individual and very specific field to it because it's written by somebody in egypt and in in that context and i think it has this wonderful combination of familiar and unfamiliar which i which i really love in literature um and another project which i'm coming to the end of now is the one wenchin mentioned in the introduction which is a book of short stories by hyphen the word they're only called things that can't be fixed which are sat between germany and egypt um the author lives in germany but he comes from egypt and they're just yeah they're they're they have that same combination of estranged and the odd whether that's because they come from some other country that we don't know or whether that's because they come from perhaps a parallel universe i won't give away too much but there's there are there are strange goings on in all of his stories and also the very familiar you know berlin i live in berlin so there's a lot of the the dreary berlin cityscape and and i love that combination um i suppose yeah when it i suppose we may talk about about about this a little bit more later but some of the things i that really matter to me in translation as a field are that rigor that i talked about earlier technical rigor i think um there's a bit of a kind of often fruitless debate that goes on about the tension between something being technically right and also being a literary good literary product in its own right um you may recall the kind of furory over um deborah smith's translation of handkang's the vegetarian which won this you know extremely prestigious prize and yet there were a lot of people saying that she'd made so many mistakes in translation from the Korean and you know i feel i can talk about this with some kind of distance because i know nothing about korean as a you know korean language or korean literature but but that was yeah i think it's a somewhat fruitless debate because a good translation has to be both of these things doesn't it has to be technically right you can't have mistakes and yet it also has to be this this good literary product in its own right which makes which makes translation quite a unique art form i think um and yeah that's one of the things that makes it such a challenging and always stimulating job i'll leave it there for now and perhaps we'll return to some of these subjects you have a second round right so you will have you will all come back and then talk more we'll get into the nitty gritty then yes we'll get and i will have questions to ask you as well if you know if you stop and i feel that i want to hear more والآن إلى الدكتور وان الذي سيتحدث باللغة العربية عن ترجماته العربية من الصينية وخاصة الكتب الكلاسية الصينية حايد السلام عليكم ايوه الحضور الكرام اسمح لي انه وشرككم بفبتي يعني في هذه المناسبة اولا اريد ان اعبر عن شكر الجزيل الى جيزة الشيخ زايد للكتاب وكذلك الجامعة السعاص فبنسبة للعلاقة بين الترجمة والثقافة اعتقد ان لا توجد ثقافة بدون من دون ترجمة ولا توجد ترجمة من دون ثقافة فهما كالجزد وروح فالثقافة هي قلب ترجمة واللبه الفائل وليزارجة يعني بدأت وترجم الكلاسيكية السينية وترجمة الكلاسيكية السينية ترجمة ثقافية الى حد كبير وهي تشتمل على ترجمة الداخل اللغة واحي والترجمة من اللغة الى اخرى الكانت الكلاسيكية السينية مقتوبة باللغة الصينية القديمة بالتحداج ترجمةها الى نقلها بدائة من الصيني القديمة الى الصيني الحديثة قبل نقلها الى الصيني الحديثة الى اللغة عربية الحديثة وهذا يعني قد يؤدي الى افقاضها بعد منما كانت تتفرض به من تلالات والأوزان والإقاعات والأسليب يعني بدأت وترجم الكلاسيكية السينية الى العربية قبل عشر سنوات يعني بعد ان تعلمت اللغة عربية واكثر من 30 سنة يعني في عام 1985 وتعوانت مع مؤسسة فيك عربي وهذه مؤسسة قد استرت لي أربعة الكتب الكلاسيكية وهي شيمزي والليزي واحديث عن تزول الحكمة والمسامرات بجوار الموقع إن شاء الله يعني سوف تصلر لي الكتاب خامس وهي عام فيزي في عام في هذا العام عام 2022 يعني أما كتاب شيمزي فهو يعني فشيمزي هو فلسوف سيني القديم هو بادر الأول مرة في التاريخ السيني القول بالطب الشرير للانسان وهذا يختلف عن منشوس الذي آمن بالتبع الخير الإنسان وهو دائيا الى صحر الأداب القوانين في بوطة قطين واحدة وإلا إيما يحتمام بالغ في تحذيب الخلقي ولا إيقاب القوانون وهذا يعني الجملة ماخوزة من هذا الكتاب مثل من يعنى من يعدوا ما هو صائب صائبا وما هو خاطئ خاطئا هو عقل ومن يعدوا ما هو خاطئ صائبا وما هو صائب خاطئا هو جاهل والكتاب ثاني هو كتاب ليسي يعني والليسي هو فلسوف شهير في عصر الممالك المدحري السينية وأول مفكر يدعو إلى نظرية مراحل أربع للنشر الكون وأول أديب يجمع بين أستورة والحكمة في عصر ما قبل أسرات شين الملكية وأيضا هناك جملة أو إبارات ماخوزة من هذا الكتاب أعما قول لا يقال وأسمى فعل لا يفعل بفعله ومن يسير عصره يزدهر ومن يخالف عصره ينتثر أما الكتاب السالث وهو كتاب أحديث عن جزر حكمة وبقلم الفلسوفسيني هون يمين وهذا الكتاب دون مجموعة كبيرة من أقوى الماسورة وهذه الأقوى الماسورة تتناول كيفية تحذي بنفس ومعشرة الناس ومعلجة أمور وتبادل تعامل مع العالم ومنها بعد الإبارات مثلا حينما لا تعنيك عزة والذلة ستفضوا هاديا في مشاهدة تفتو الأزهار والصقوذها أمام الفناه وحينما لا يهمك رحيل والبقاب ستقدوا دائما حائما في متابعة أنكبادي الصحب أو انبسادها فوق السماء هذا هو الكتاب أحديث عن جزر حكمة أما الكتاب الرابع فهو يعني مسامرات بجوار الموقع يعني وهذا كتاب هو يدم 211 حكمة وتدور موضوعاتها حول الإنسان واستقراره وامنها وحول وجود برمتي ومنها طيب سوف أتربك مثلا من هذا الأجملة من هذه معقوزة من هذا الكتاب لا يمكن الإنسان ألا يحمل دموحات عظيمة فإن لم يكن دموحا فسيضوا ملوثا بما هو وحر ومنها ملوثا بما هو واسخ حتى لا تتحقب له آية إنجازات أية إنجازات ولا يمكن الإنسان أن يحمل أتماآ كبيرة فإن كانت أماآ فسيضوا فإنه يخطيه سوف يتركه من كل ما يقوم به يترك بعد كل ما يقوم به لذلك لا تنظر أي مجموعة من such a person كما لتالي فرح الكتاب التي لم يكن إرادة أو إرادة yet و will share with you some of the quotes from this book like what does not last will not last and what's empty will not live longer it's not smart for a person to talk about what they don't know nor a loyal who keeps what they know from others this is some of the most famous quotations from the and why sayings from the warring states era and he is the most prominent speaker from the for the legal school way of thought thank you very much thank you very much i'm looking forward to our second session and we will continue our talk thank you very much again شكرا جزيل and Dr Wang so we we come now to our round two so we go back to نوال now that all of you have listened to each other i wonder whether you know what you have said right triggered anything so we go back to we go to round two and we return to نوال so if نوال if there's a comeback from you or addition from you unmute unmute yourself you're muted okay first of all i am interested in asking يانغون about the he mentioned that classical chinese is different from modern chinese and in order to translate it into arabic he had to translate the they had he had to use did he use the the arabic modernized the chinese modernized version in order to translate the chinese i'm asking because in arabic we have a different case arabic language did not change much from medieval times and and you know the standard arabic nowadays we use today i mean it changed regarding vocabulary regarding you know of course with the changes of times but basically i can easily read like a 10th century 9th century manuscripts into i mean and they read perfectly all right to me i mean it didn't change that much so i'm interested in knowing about the situation in china how was it like i mean is it like english for example um chaucer for example he wrote in the 14th century but i don't understand it i have to read it translated into you know modern english so i'd like him to elaborate on this language yeah i will save him for later but you know now is there anything else that you would like to add to what you had said earlier yeah well yeah i realized that i was you know too brief in my presentation um the three books i translated i consider them a wealth they have sources for wealth of information on the uh that important period in the arab word the translating them into english by translating them into english i try to fill a gap in the knowledge in the western world of what happened during between uh you know the antiquity times of antiquity and after let's say 14th 15th century um the um in the west world they noticed that there are certain the the european equation started to use certain ingredients like rose water lot of sugar and saffron and these are all you know arab ingredients so how come they they feature in those european uh cookbooks and before translating those books before you know having really concrete uh evidence of what happened during the from the period of 9th and 14th century in the arab word they didn't have they didn't couldn't understand in their discussions they couldn't stand on firm grounds on what really happened but here we have in those books like primary sources they are the you know here you have recipes uh using those ingredients there is a you know a concrete evidence of of what happened and how this happened uh the speculation is that the influence between the influence of the arab word on the western medieval western cuisine happened through uh two venues either the through the crusaders or through the eight centuries of of arab stay in in andalus both ways of course they had their their venues in order to you know transmit this culinary tradition from east to west but i think that at andalus during those eight centuries it played a really a significant role in the transmission of this information and that's why i find that the last book i translated best of delectable foods of dishes i find it very important because it was written in the 13th century it's um a well written book it's a huge book very well organized and um you can easily see you know what was cooking at the time and the things that were transmitted um i have an issue with indirect translations i mean you lose so much i mean we talk about lost in translation which is a true uh because i know from what happened in medieval times um for example books on dietetics by physicians like ibn jazla ibn butlan uh their books were important and the western word realized their importance for specialists and for the laymen what happened was they had to translate them first of all into latin other countries european countries wanted to also know about them so from latin for example to german and if you compare the latin with the german you see that they didn't really get the you know full benefit of those wonderful books that's why to me primary sources like those cookbooks they are important um they also you know give us also a knowledge firm knowledge on on arabic cuisine i mean i i don't really also i mean i mean it is they are beneficial to the western research but they are also important for us as arabs and because they give us uh you know uh really a full image of what happened and how things developed because now we are all practicing arabic cuisine how did we get it how did it develop we go to those primary sources from different parts of the arab word from bagdad you egypt and from morocco and we see what continued what discontinued and and and and so on even there are things i didn't know you know i discovered while while while doing these for example you know i'm really thrilled about this morocco this andelicy cookbook because in it you find the the beginning you know the the dish we said they the in morocco it's besty bestyla bestyla or they call it bestia um it's really a big thing in north africa but there in the 13th century we have a recipe that describes how this dish was how this dish was made and in another andelicy cookbook it was called um al faraj that is the mother of happy endings i think this is my theory i think they call it the mother of happy endings because it is such a difficult dish i mean it's it's really a pain in the neck but then after cooking this dish there you go you have a bundle of joy that's why they called it you know mother of happy endings so all these discovers you know you make they are the things that keep you going and you know you know it's not easy work but it keeps you going another thing i discovered and i was thrilled when i did my my egyptian cookbook the treasure trove had i not translated this book i would have missed something very important which is a certain tool that is mentioned only in one in one manuscript and it is called they call it mefrac from what i understood is that it was used like today's we use the uh this you know the this stand blender and i discovered that there was something used in egypt going back to the roman times and there is a picture of it i mean i saw a picture of it in the in the aleksandrian and in the museum in aleksandria when i probed into this subject even further i discovered that the same tool is still being used in southern egypt in and sudan and they also call it mefrac so i was so fascinated that my husband made for me the mefrac the way they use it is that they do this like this you know in the in the dishes and they and they blend them but this tells us really you know this is something that if something is good it works it stays so uh you know you get so many lessons when you read those books but you have to pay attention you have to be patient if i hadn't translated this book i wouldn't have discovered this another thing those cookbooks are also important in that uh they i mean we read for example in so many stories or about food about dishes they mentioned um up until the 80s before the beginning of the editing of those arabic books we didn't know whether these were exaggerations were they true did this really thing happen for example i read they um in about a dish that cost a thousand dirhams it was made by uh with fish tongues and it was the it was the uh the favorite dish of uh Haroun al-Rashid's half brother ibrahim bin al-Mahdi who was uh you know he was a gastronomic you know authority at the time and i found in the 10th century cookbook you know like by ibn sayar al-warraq a recipe which is like aspect and uses towns of fishes lots of them and it is said that it was the favorite of ibrahim bin al-Mahdi so i mean we have to uh you know they also this is another function for those recipes they also confirm or you know they they tell us whether i mean we can tell whether those stories were you know were exaggerated or they were based on things that really happened which i think which i rather you know think that they were you know they were not really mere exaggerations or the the product of their imagineation because in the Moroccan in the andalusie book i translated in my research for example i read even khaldoun for example said that the diet of the andalusies the urbanites among them uh that was mostly um made with chicken and lamb and i think i mean i believe this because in this chapter in the chapters on on the mutton and lamb and in the chicken chapter we have more than uh in each more than 40 recipes of of chicken and you know lamb so we have we've got to believe what they say also another thing there were they also that we read in the books that there was somebody made you know held a party in which nothing served but chicken but you know chicken dishes lots of them and of course i mean with that many dishes you find in el-tujibi in el-tujibi's book i mean you you've got to believe them so i mean there's no end to the benefits of those of those books great thank you noel yeah let's turn to kathryn now where's the second wind i'm amazed i didn't even know fish had tongues so i learned something very interesting today thank you no one well that was so interesting um just a couple of reflections on what both of you have said both of my co-panelists um i'm very interested in in the kind of historical uh aspects of what you do as you know the translation process that you both have to go through with your work and and and i share noel's um interest in the challenges of translating from old chinese um you young so i'd be really interested to hear more about that and and i think noel in your case it i mean i imagine there must be quite a lot of more practical translation if i can call it that involved in things like working out what measurements are and so on like if they say i don't know you know i'd give you a currency for the you know one deadhams worth of this or whatever then i suppose you have to work out what on earth that was worth and how much that translates into was a quantity of the ingredient so i'm really curious as to how you go about doing that and whether or not you actually try your recipes because that seems to me like a really interesting kind of translation yeah yeah um well to begin with i mean uh no no sorry sorry can we sort of like let katherine finish and then come back to you to answer these questions like let let me sort of like do this so that uh dr wang would have some time to as well yeah katherine i was also reflecting as you were both speaking on um you know i think you're obviously both extremely invested in translating a very specific genre and a specific body of knowledge which is really really interesting and i'm curious as to the motives for doing that i i can imagine that one motive might be to showcase what is a simply um brilliant and interesting culture in its own right whether it's you know the cuisine of the medieval Islamic world or you know the philosophy of of the chinese classics and i'm interested is that a big part of why you do it is there also an interest in you know this body of knowledge as something to learn from and something that's relevant to us today um because some of those words of wisdom professor wang i wonder if if you see them as something that you know could give us um yeah things to reflect on in in modern life whether it's you know us reading them or or or people who read them in arabic um and now i noticed that you're uh you know with your interest in these very very practical things like this implement used uh used in your cookbooks you know are you are you interested in in how the people of the past lived and what what that can tell us i'm yeah i'm curious about that that kind of motive um i've i've done some historical translation myself um a little bit less recently but um some of the academic work that i was doing during my studies involved looking at um the writings of uh jews in arabic and i've translated translated a fair a fair bit of stuff by abumallar who was um an egyptian nationalist um he was jewish and he wrote primarily in arabic but also he used to have written in italian and french he was i guess he was a polymath and a real character and yeah a couple of other jewish writers also of arabic and i think um on the one hand that's interesting as a body of literature because it's simply great writing i mean abumallar is is funny he's a caricaturist as well he's not it's it's it's cartoons accompanied by text and poetry and captions and and speech bubbles and it's i mean it's wonderful to read but it's also um it's also a glimpse of a very different time when um things were very different in the middle east and it was perfectly normal for jews to speak and write in arabic and i think that is something that we can learn from in itself um so so for me there's that that double motive of you know showcasing this wonderful body of literature but also thinking about what we can learn from this time gone by and the way that these people used to write um yeah i think i'll leave it leave it there for now because i've asked so many questions okay so نوال hold hold your thoughts i'll turn to dr. Wang right for his few words right and please you know respond it looks like uh uh أنه الأسئلة كلها مواجهة إليك خلينا نسمع منك okay thank you very much for this question that has been that i have been tasked to answer by dr. نوال and miss kathryn in truth this is a question that that that most that all translators are keen to know more about whether from the or the Arabic one because these classics as i have said and mentioned before are written in ancient chinese so we don't have any bases in the ancient chinese and we cannot express their way their their unique way in this very short sayings keeping it short just like the arabic saying the best talk is what is short and direct to the meaning so how can we express these chinese classics in their own way in their own exceptional writing skills this is the great challenge that faces all translators whether from the chinese side or the arabic one as for the arabic one when i translate chinese classics i always review the explanations the descriptions of these classics the explanations the interpretations of these ancient chinese and in modern chinese in order for me to understand them to grasp their meaning however when i pick the words i have to choose according according to the ancient chinese texts and not according to the modern one the contemporary one because if we are translating chinese classics and and and and with or rather in modern chinese this this will lead to a loss and to prolong things which was not something that the ancient chinese texts were keen on having they averted it so we're trying to keep things short according to the ancient language so how can we strengthen our roots in ancient chinese we chinese people we read poems and and ancient chinese texts to establish ourselves in ancient chinese first since our early childhood from from elementary school and we recite we memorize poems just like arabs do with their poetry in order to express in with less words in a more refined manner with that gives more meaning so this is the challenge the first challenge in ترانسل تينيس كلاسكس so this question takes me to another one leads me to another one who's going to translate into chinese classics as i think a chinese translator should should should pick classics however he has to collaborate and keenly بين the chinese translator and the arabic editor or reviewer to be in a way that is attractive to the arab audience and to transfer these chinese classics these chinese philosophy into the arab audience in the right manner in a way that attracts and is close to the hearts of the arab readers this is what i wanted to talk i wanted to talk about these two issues or topics who's translating chinese classics and what are the challenges that they're facing that we face in translating these chinese classics i hope that i was that my answer was convincing and fulfilling yes thank you very much thank you we sort of like opened the sort of q&a to the audience nawal you wanted to answer kathryn's questions and then please go ahead while i think about how to bring all of you together right so just go ahead nawal if you want to well kathryn you asked me about uh whether amounts and the equivalence in modern you know in modern usage well let me begin by like saying that up until the mid 20th century or something we all cooked by what they say we say eye measurement i mean we just we don't use measurements and most of the recipes in those books they depended on on the knowledge of the cook on the eye measurements but they also in some of the recipes we have exact measurements and for giving equivalence which i i did i mean wherever there are measurements in those books between brackets i give the equivalence in pounds and ounces and grams because i want to give the reader an idea of the proportions this is important for consistency for the consistency the resulting consistency of the dish there are sources that discuss how much is for example uh قيرات how much is a uh رطل and how much it was in that time so i use those tables in order to make those equivalence it wasn't really that difficult because that was uh an important matter in the muslim world or how much the for example people during the time of a prophet Muhammad how much was it worth because you know when they they had to you know to give exact measurements and to emulate the for example the ways of the the ways the that was that were done during the the time um the other question was what was it the motive my motive yes my motive is about reading reading things from the distant past and knowing how before yeah yeah well um when i read those books of course uh i wasn't blown away so to speak by the all the information uh i found there by the similarities um you know by and i i became really quite convinced that the of the continuity of the the you know of the arabic cuisine especially in iraq because now i know how we cook things i know how things were cooked during the Babylonian times from those Babylonian you know ancient recipes and i have two books from back that cooking those dishes and i was able to see you know the progression of the cuisine in the same region which you do not find you know this is was really a rare chance for me which you do not find in other in the discussion of the cuisines of other cultures and what motivated me also was because you know i i i i read about the you know the food studies about the the new research on medieval times whether in al-Andalus whether in the levant iraq and i see that there are certain things that were misunderstood because of course that was due to lack of information for example in one of the a small book by al-Baghdadi the 13th century was translated by orientalist arbery but there was a a dish that we do not a condiment we do not use nowadays it is murray which is the equivalent of fish sauce in for example in southeast asia or the soy sauce in in china it was a very laborious thing that we know very little about until we got of course other recipes in the in the rest of the books so arbery of course i don't blame him he translated something called buddha naj as he thought it was food naj which was penny royal a kind of mint so the resulting recipe for example he gave to to generations of readers he gave the impression that this fermented sauce was made with mint and other things which in fact it was not buddha naj was a rotted bread they made it was fish it was not fish based it was not a soy beans based it was cereal based this fermented sauce in order to begin the fermentation they had to to prepare dough and and make and and cause it to rot they keep it for 40 days they wrap this dough in fig leaves and they cover them until they rot and they use this part in order to make the the the fermented sauce so i thought i mean he gave generations of readers the wrong impression this is the danger you know of not interpreting things the the right way i mean might might have led to food poisoning right might might have let me sort of try to sort of make links and today we're talking about translation and culture exchange and so on so forth so i'm going to sort of like pulling all you know why we wait for the audience to write up their questions i'm going to share with you an anecdote and an idea so as a child who grew up in libya i had fried birds right cooked birds roast birds and so on and so forth never had had in libyan cuisine birds cooked in green so i thought that was cooked cooked well cooked well green green in in soup right in green right um but it came with this so so i went to sort of like nudging for a conference and i was there and you know nudging is famous for its duck cooked in Xian Shui Ya in chinese right and what was sort of my host said you know well come you know you would like this and you know and he found out i was interested in cuisines in semiotics of food and in islam and in the arab world and he said oh you didn't know this this the Xian Shui Ya is brought to china by the muslims i said what it's arab no such thing so in a while i went to your cook the cookbook he translated في مطبخل خليفة or خلفة i found the recipes right which one which one was it which one was it they're all of them different ones but you have this popular you just soup your water and then you you'll put oh stews yeah stews yeah yeah not stews right you just dip the bird in very quickly you take it out cut it and then you put the condiment garnishes on it yeah yeah the cuisine you know this kind of yeah yeah right and then in time we forget about them and i come to kathrin's questions right are we interested in why are we interested in reading about the past and i want to come back to this idea that all of you brought to to the foreground today and i want to use the word أدب in arabic and when in chinese to think about it right so أدب أمهات الكتب الصينية أمهات الكتب العربية these all belong to this category of when and أدب and these two categories include poetry history fiction story storytelling أستدق and ethics all together so this these two categories and what we i see here is this conversation right among you but also among the different parts of our literally culture if i can say it this way and i want to come to you know what and ask you about the relationship between the ethics of health of maintaining health and cuisine which is a huge part of cookbooks right yeah it's not like the kind of political war we get in about hummus and falafel but it's really about that but also when ibn butlan writes in دعوة الاتباء it's having fun it's aesthetic it's literally and that's what kathrin is concerned with right but it is also philosophical it's ethics of every day living that professor wang is telling us about in أمهات الكتب الصينية in the classic chinese classics so can we have some comments about this and about sort of how these cultures classical modern chinese and arabic bring us together to an area where we can think about something called global humanities which is a topic we will address in our event number four yeah and and the interests all our interests in that while i wait for questions from the audience yeah shall we yeah nowhere you you you enthusiastic let's start with you well let me give the chance to others when i i speak little later yeah we'll speak last okay maybe we'll reverse the order dr wang yeah non that epic notification i added uh the about the relationship between chinese culture and the arabic one through their contemplating about arabic culture and when chinese culture في الناس. و في الشهر. في كما تقوننا يجب عليك أن تضيارك. إذن يجب عليك أن تؤدي시 تعطية. حتى أننا بإمكانك كتب أخرج العالم. إذن أنك أتفجأة وتكلمة أخرجات إضافة تجربة. إذن أنك أحنا بحقك الدقة. أنت بأس. إذا هنالك. هنالك. إذن إذا أتبعوا بإمكانك أن تؤديس من خلال مخيمة الشباب. إذن أن هناك كلاسيك مع الجانان الأربي. وهل أخطب ذلك؟ أخطب. ما هو your question again please the question was not clear to me the question was not clear I'll repeat it, I'll try I forgot my own question I would like to connect and bridge the gap between the three interventions, between yours Noel's and Catherine's through connecting these three interventions through the concept of Arabic Literature and Chinese Win Chinese Literature, we find in Win and in Arabic Literature, in both of them we find books or texts that are philosophical in nature cultural civilized artistic literary and all of them, artistic and all of them they answer topics that are not just artistic nature but also philosophical and ethical and health wise to take care of your health as part of your daily ethics your daily way of being could you give us your own remarks on on what's similar between Chinese Philosophy or Wisdom I think it's better to call them Wisdoms Chinese Wisdom and Arabic Wisdom so this compatibility between the two and truth but Chinese culture is quite keen on combining or on the relationship between human being his society and nature as for literature this is a word of utmost importance in Chinese Culture whether it was in Chinese Classics so when we are talking here about philosophy we always combine philosophy with literature or we express a certain philosophical idea in a literary manner as well as when we eat whether it's breakfast lunch or dinner we are keen and we give importance to the color and the shape and the looks of course and taste as well to these Chinese dishes so it's not just taste but we are also keen on the way it's presented sometimes we make a flower shape or a type of bird we make a type of bird a shape of bird on the table so that the flower on that table would enjoy enjoy it through eyesight just as much through their tongues so we enjoy both its taste and its looks which indicates that Chinese Culture is quite keen on combining both philosophy thoughts and literature as for literature since the earliest times China just like the Arabic nation has poetry just like Arabs working on poetry we have a book on songs that was before the Qi Dynasty which has various different types of literature that develop and evolve from one age to another and diversify and at the same time we we we take from Arabic literature just like Mr. Basam in the forth event in the upcoming forth event he has translated many Arabic works into Chinese like as well as poems we academics we are very keen on transferring Arabic culture and Arabic art and literature into Chinese which means that there is this rich exchange between the two cultures and we benefit from one another شكرا لك شكرا لك كاثرين you're still in the middle I'm going to very much echo what Youyong has said there I think although I'm going to answer your question in a slightly roundabout way I'd like to just return to what Youyong said in his last intervention about the importance of working with an Arabic language editor when he's translating from Chinese I think this is something that we often forget about translation there's an image of the translator who sits alone surrounded by books in the library their dictionaries but of course translation is always collaborative I often find that in my work I'm always bringing up friends to ask what things mean or to ask them how they interpret things because in the end translators are readers so I'm interested in thinking about other people's other readers interpretations as well as my own and sadly I think in the in Anglophone publishing there isn't enough of an appreciation of how important it is to have editors who are specialized in editing translations and who can do so with reference to the original Arabic that's something I'd love to see a lot more of and I think that would help very much in helping cement a kind of standard of good standards of rigor within the publishing of translations from Arabic but translation is collaborative that's one thing and the other thing that translation is I suppose a constant striving for perfection that might possibly never arrive and now I didn't mention this today but we met a couple of days ago just to test Zoom and so on and she was telling us about some recipes which called for fish as an ingredient that didn't say what kind of fish it was and I thought this idea of a mystery fish was just such a wonderful metaphor for something that we all come across in translation which is these things that you just can't quite work out and these things that you know remain out of reach somehow and I think that's so often an experience I've had in I wouldn't play many of my translations are perfect but all these things I haven't quite managed to get my head around so translation is always collaborative translation is always exploratory and yeah absolutely of course if I come back now to the idea of global humanities that's not a term I tend to particularly think of my work as being involved and but I would say that the same is true of our humanity that it's collaborative that it's exploratory, that it's creative and this is why I'm so interested in reading and engaging with the writings of others be they in my case I translate writings that come from perhaps a different place perhaps simply a different language community many of the writers whose work I translate actually live in the same city as me so they're not such geographical others they just happen to use a different language of expression but you know Noel and Duyong both translate the writings of historical others as well and I think that I would go so far as say that our humanity is not complete when we don't engage with the thoughts and the artistic products of those others or when we treat them merely as curios to be just kind of looked at as something that's different so that's that's my thought on your question of humanities and humanity yeah thank you so much Catherine before I let you have the I'm going to read to you a comment from one of our guests who is attending from China Eileen Chen I have one comment for Nawad Philippe Hetty also included that fish tongue anecdote in his history an unforgettable story in the Chinese tradition fish whiskers very comparable are said to be an utmost delicacy the eras of your translation the 10th century of Baghdad one and the 13th century of Andalusian one and the 14th century of the Kairin one actually where the golden ages of each one of the different areas of the Islamic world we as readers and researchers of medieval times thank you so much for your continuous efforts in making these delicious translations that makes my day لكي مسكل ختام before I thank everyone لكي مسكل ختام there are certain dishes that you find during that period they transmitted they were through the Mughals they translated to whether they were transmitted to India and also to China when they were ruled by the Mughals there is this book A Soup for the Khan it's a translation of a Chinese book on an ancient book on dietetics and proper eating and there are recipes in fact that are similar to the 13th century Baghdad cookbook so there is always this influence to and fro from those places and those I think those basic resources we are providing through translation all of us they help us you know in deciphering all those movements among cultures and you know I think they are really essential yeah thank you so much everyone for gracing us with your presence and for your contributions and for your delicious discourses the event is recorded for those of you who want to listen to this but I don't know how it's going to be disseminated but I'm sure someone you'll give you an answer so let's us all together thank our distinguished panelists again for sharing their thoughts their practices and more importantly their translations across regions cultures languages and times so thank you very much thank you so much for hosting us thank you professor Villan thank you so much