My First Arabic Book Translation

I’ve been sitting on this for a while. 

Early in 2017, I was lucky to get put in touch with Sami Al-Hajj and al-Jazeera by a good friend. They were looking for someone to translate Sami’s memoirs from Arabic into English. I had done similar work in the past, working Zaeef’s memoirs from his Guantánamo time that later expanded into My Life With the Taliban. I had never done any serious translation from Arabic, however, particularly of this length.

I finished translating a while back. It was both harder and more enjoyable than I had expected. Harder in that it requires an intense focus that can’t really let up while the translation is happening. More enjoyable since I realised the process was something that brought in a lot of creativity to get the language ‘just right’.

Today, Sami’s memoirs have been published. You can download the PDF version via Al-Jazeera here. It looks like Kindle and iBooks versions will be made available in due course as well.

I hope you get a chance to give this book a read. Not only is it some work that I spent a good chunk of time working on, but it’s a really useful and moving account of someone who passed through Guantánamo. In particular, Sami was often on a hunger strike so there is a lot of detail on his mental state and coping mechanisms, as well as the way the medical authorities at Guantánamo attempted to 'deal' with the problem.

Variations on a Pomodoro

I've recently started work on a large translation project (about which more in due course). This sees me grappling with the Arabic text for several hours each day. Early on, I tried replicating my '4 perfect hours' approach that had worked so well when writing my PhD dissertation.

Translation is hard work, and tougher on the brain in ways I hadn't first anticipated, not having done it full time before. So I've found myself adjusting my 45-minutes-work, 15-minutes-rest cycle to something closer to 25-minutes-work, 5-minutes-rest (with a longer 15-20 minute gap every 4 cycles).

For writing and anything where you're trying to hold lots of pieces of information in your head, it makes sense to go for longer stretches of time if you can. 45 minutes was ideal for writing my PhD, since any shorter and I felt like I was loosing too much time rebooting all the information at the beginning of each new session.

Translation is far more piecemeal, in a way. I can work on one sentence at a time, at least in this stage of the process, so shorter sessions work just fine.

This is all just an extended way of saying that customisation is important, and whatever you read online (or hear on a podcast or whatever) needs to fit into your own life, needs and patterns rather than the other way round.

Knot 2: Translation as Trauma, Taxis and Artificial Intelligence

This week I fell back in love with a piece of software (DevonThink Pro Office) while reorganising and refreshing two dozen archival databases. I’ve been busy putting the final touches on The Taliban Reader and I’ve made new strides of progress on the slackline.

Articles

• Lina Mounzer - “War in Translation: Giving Voice to
  the Women of Syria” (Lithub)

A deeply affecting account of the author’s work as a translator of stories from Syria, how language mediates and obfuscates the terrifying realities of daily life, and how even translation and re-communication gives rise to secondary trauma of a kind. If you read nothing else this week, make it this article.

• Hamzah Nassif - “Understanding Amman’s Yellow Taxi Dilemma: a Different Take on the Government’s Ongoing Battle With Ride-Hailing Apps” (The Black Iris)

I wrote about Amman’s taxis in my Arabic-language newsletter, and this (slightly old) piece helps answer some of my questions as to why taxi drivers in Jordan’s capital behave as they do. It also makes a strong case for changing the status quo. Taxi drivers seem barely able to make a living under current circumstances, and passengers aren’t getting much of a service.

• David Meyer - “The dark side of .io: How the U.K. is making web domain profits from a shady Cold War land deal” (Gigaom)

As someone who has just bought a couple of new .io domains, I was unsettled to learn the backstory, how something dating back to the early nineteenth century’s colonial expansion (in this case, to the Chagos islands) has a direct descendent in the modern age. I’m most likely not going to return the domains I bought, but I probably won’t buy anything new from the .io set.

• Andrew Ng - “What Artificial Intelligence Can and Can’t Do Right Now” (Harvard Business Review)

There’s nothing especially new in this overview piece by one of the leaders in the field of artificial intelligence, both in terms of innovation and education. But it’s nevertheless a useful summary of some of the unique features of AI and machine learning, as well as some of the things it is less good at.

• Richard Benton - “Language hacking ≠ language love” (Loving Languages)

Richard’s posts are excellent at returning us to the reasons why it’s worth learning languages — to connect, to be useful perhaps, and not to simply chalk up notches on one’s belt. This recent posts is a challenge to the thankfully-less-omnipresent online polyglot community. Recommended if you’ve ever studied more than one second-language.

Books

This week, I reread Rework by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson. Looking into my Goodreads list, I noted that I gave it a two-star rating when I first read it a few years back. Now, perhaps I was in a better place to absorb some of the lessons, but I gave it four stars. I’ll be writing a longer review for the blog here of some of the more contrarian or unexpected lessons. I’m currently reading Rebecca Solnit’s Men Explain Things to Me alongside Mark Manson’s The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fck* (as audiobook).

Films / TV

I’m working my way through Channel 4’s Humans, albeit painfully slowly. It was recommended on a recent podcast as a possible vision for what a future with humanoid AI machines might look like: not as different as we might imagine, but still different enough to provoke some real societal challenges.