Interview by al-Arabiyya wa al-Tarjama magazine
It was not chance that offered a way to introduce Dr. Mehmet Hakkı Suçin so much as the need to introduce his creative linguistic work. While Suçin was climbing mountains and roaming the plains between Lebanon and Turkey, his literary passion for connecting Arab and Turkish cultures was taking an intellectual course within him. Such was the chance meeting with Dr. Mehmet Hakkı Suçin, which he explained with his courtesy, his interest in the Arabic language and its literature, and his conviction that it must communicate with other cultures. He sees harmony between perceptual reality and philology as the element that links the understanding of nations, renews civilisations and forges human bonds – through the music of poetry, the intensity of love and courtship in fiction, or the historical depth between them. With these premises and this background, the chance of scholarship and language led us to conduct this interview with Dr. Mehmet Hakkı Suçin, professor of Arabic at Gazi University in Ankara.
In your view, is translation a transfer from one language to another, or from one culture to another?
I believe language and culture are intertwined and cannot be separated. There are texts in which the linguistic dimension is more prominent – purely scientific texts, for example – and texts in which the cultural dimension is more visible, such as the translation of a people’s traditional dishes. But in both cases language is not isolated from culture, nor culture from language. Culture is more specific than language: it is a term covering behaviour, practices, rituals, traditions, knowledge, beliefs, art, law, morals and the other customs a person acquires as a member of society. Language is the means of conveying these acquisitions. So when I translate, I look at the text as an integrated system, without isolating it from the linguistic and cultural context on which it was built.
There is often talk of the problem of ambiguous terminology when translating from a foreign text into Arabic. What do you think is the way to deal with this problem, and how do you envisage applying what you see as the solution?
There are well-known principles for coining new terms: transparency and clarity of meaning, consistency, appropriateness, brevity, derivability, linguistic correctness and a preference for the mother tongue. But it is not easy to meet all these conditions when coining a new term. Terms are usually drawn from many sources: some already exist in the language concerned, some are modifications and adaptations of current sources, and some are created as new terms using various strategies. In any case, coining terms is not a process that happens “in the blink of an eye”, so to speak. It goes beyond individual efforts and requires an organised, institutional outlook, supplied by individual efforts and drawing strength from theoretical studies in the field. Every term passes through several stages before its use becomes established: first, the preparatory stage, which requires study of the semantic fields of the intended term in both source and target languages; second, the stage of coining the term in line with the principles and strategies of terminology; and finally, the stage of disseminating it so that users adopt it. All these stages are carried out methodically in order to reach positive results.
With this background, allow me to return to your question about ambiguous terminology. There are many problems connected with ambiguity, some relating to the coiner and some to the recipient. As for the coiner, the problem is a lack of command of the principles and strategies for bringing foreign terms into Arabic: knowing a language does not necessarily mean knowing how to coin new terms. A coiner who knows more than one foreign language may also be better able to create more practical terms. In some European countries, especially Germany, this field has become a scientific discipline in its own right and is emphasised in translation studies programmes, so translators need to adapt to it.
As for the recipients, this concerns the Arabic language institutions, which must create systematic, constantly renewed channels for following the terms produced by individuals and institutions all over the world – bearing in mind that, in an age marked by globalisation, Arabic terms are not produced in the Arab world alone. There are in fact official Arab institutions on the ground, such as the Coordination Bureau of Arabization and other Arab academies and centres, but what they lack is close coordination with the Arabic-speaking public. Since the public is the end user, the gap between them must be closed so that coined terms spread among the language’s speakers. In this regard I must commend the efforts of the Arab Organization for Translation in compiling glossaries of terms in the books it has published from foreign languages. Official Arab institutions should benefit from this experience to unify and standardise efforts. And the translator into Arabic should not coin a term before reviewing all the efforts that preceded it, so as to arrive at the best. There must also be open channels of communication between the translator and the institutions concerned with terminology; neither can do without the other.
There are many approaches to translation, from direct literal translation to the theory of meaning to combinations of the two, in which the translator may take some liberties with the text to make it smooth and supple in its passage from the source language to the target language. Where do you stand on this, and what are your convictions about the qualities of a successful translation?
The question of literalness and meaning is both old and new. If we look at the approaches of translation theorists, we see that these studies passed through similar stations bearing different names. Nida builds his theory on formal and dynamic equivalence, while Newmark distinguishes between communicative and semantic translation, and Juliane House between overt and covert translation. Although each approach has its framework defined by its theorists, in the end they are all approaches based on a binary resembling that of literal versus free. These approaches, however, have given way to other, more comprehensive and far-reaching theories that do not view translation in terms of literalness or meaning. I follow this trend in my translations. I look at the text I want to translate in an integrated way, taking into account all the features and levels of the source text, and the same is true of the target text. The purpose of the translation and the audience of the target text also help me define the framework of the translation. But in any case, I respect the creativity of the source text by having the target text embody it at all its linguistic, cultural, semantic and pragmatic levels.
Translation has historically played a major role in developing communication and interaction between cultures and peoples and has left clear traces in many fields of human creativity; many even believe that some translations helped launch shifts in knowledge and broad renaissance movements. What do you think of this, and to what extent do you think the current Arabic translation movement can play such roles in the Arab world?
As you say, translation plays an important role in shifts of knowledge and in renaissance movements. If we look at Arabic translation, we see that it passed through three stages that became “movements”, as historians of translation studies have described them. Translation contributed to such a civilisational shift in the so-called “Golden Age”, the ninth and tenth centuries, when philosophy, thought and knowledge were translated from Greek, Persian and Indian languages into Arabic, either directly or through an intermediary language, Syriac. The second civilisational shift took place in al-Andalus through translations from Arabic into Latin; without these translations the European Renaissance might have been delayed or might not have happened at all. The third station at which translation played a civilisational role was the nineteenth century, when the translation movement from and into Arabic began, preparing the ground for a new transformation in Arab-Islamic thought, starting with Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt and continuing under Muhammad Ali Pasha and his family in later periods. So translation did not merely transfer texts from one language to another; it also played the role of forming or transforming civilisations. These translation movements also gave rise to theoretical ideas about translation, terminology and other theoretical questions.
Does Turkey, past or present, have a track record in translation in general and Arabic translation in particular?
Although there are no in-depth studies, Turkey has a long history in translation. In the Anatolian Seljuk state, the state translator was appointed by royal decree, because translators were responsible for correspondence and communication with foreign states and also mediated between citizens and foreigners in court cases; they therefore enjoyed great respect both officially and unofficially. In the Ottoman period, Sultan Mehmed the Conqueror – known for his command of seven languages besides Turkish – established the office of “Tercüman” (dragoman) after the conquest of Istanbul in 1453. Professional interpreting, however, was officially established in the sixteenth century, as the Ottoman Empire’s diplomatic and commercial activities grew: translators were employed in the foreign affairs department, in provincial administration and in educational institutions such as the School of Military Engineering, as well as in foreign embassies and consulates. In the eighteenth century the French embassy set up a school to train interpreters for its own use, most of them Greeks.
There are two main periods one must know in order to analyse Turkish cultural history, translation included, accurately. Credit for this periodisation goes to Professor Saliha Paker, a pioneer of translation history in Turkey, and her academic students. The first is the period dominated by Arabic-Persian culture or Islamic sources; the second is the period dominated by European culture. In the first period (especially the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries), sacred texts and religious sources held a prominent place in translation into Turkish from Persian and Arabic. The texts seem to have been chosen on the basis of being instructive or “useful”. The Qur’an, however, was translated only late, in the fourteenth century, for religious reasons that held it to be untranslatable. Earlier translations were not translations of a source text into a target text but “word-for-word” renderings, or renderings of groups of Qur’anic phrases into groups of phrases in Old Turkish. There are also trilingual Qur’an translations from the fifteenth century: the Arabic as source text, its Persian translation, and beneath that the Turkish. There are other, non-religious translations from Persian and Arabic as well – for example those by Gülşehri, Ahmed-i Dai and Kul Mesud – and medical and scientific texts were translated from Arabic in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. In fact, most of the works I have described as translations are considered “rewritings” of the original texts, in which the translator was free to change, borrow, adapt and transform.
The period Professor Saliha Paker describes as that of contact with European culture begins with Sultan Mehmed II, known as the Conqueror, who commissioned the translation of many works into Arabic, then the language of science: books by Ptolemy, Galen and Avicenna and treatises by the Turkish astronomer and mathematician Ali Kuşçu were translated into Arabic, and translations were also made from Greek and Italian during his reign.
We see this trend continuing intensively under Sultan Ahmed III in the eighteenth century, when a 25-member committee was set up to translate from European as well as Eastern languages and translated many books in various scientific fields. In the Tanzimat period of the nineteenth century, translation “offices” were set up within state institutions. In 1851 the Encümen-i Daniş (Academy of Sciences) and the Ottoman Scientific Society were founded, overseeing the translation of a large number of scientific books and teaching materials from European languages. In this period the first literary translators brought three literary genres into Turkish: Western poetry, the philosophical dialogue and the novel. Prominent translators of the period include Yusuf Kamil Pasha, Ahmed Vefik Pasha, Şemseddin Sami, Abdullah Cevdet, Hüseyin Cahit and Haydar Rifat.
In the founding period of the Turkish Republic, translation played an active role in launching the cultural revolution that supported the “Westernisation” programme of the secular Republic of Turkey founded by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk in 1923. That same year a committee for original works and translations was formed, and translation into modern Turkish began. The first Turkish translation of the Qur’an in the Latin alphabet appeared in 1932. This activity became a translation “movement” in 1939, when a specialised translation bureau was set up to translate world classics, philosophy and literature with the aim of creating a “renaissance” that would help develop Turkish language and culture. By the end of 1944, 109 works had been translated, Greek and French classics foremost among them, and by 1967 more than 1,000 translations had been published, including some Eastern and Islamic texts.
You are known for your interest in the Arabic language. In which intellectual and cultural areas have you published your research?
Academically, I am interested in translation studies, foreign-language teaching methods, modern Arabic literature and modern Turkish literature, as well as creative drama. In all these fields I try to help build links between Arab and Turkish cultures at various levels, because Arabic studies in Turkey are not at the level they should be – just as Turkish studies are not in the Arab world.
The Arab Organization for Translation has translated books in many fields of knowledge, but readers are asking it to open up to other creative fields such as poetry, fiction and criticism. What do you think?
I commend the Arab Organization for Translation’s efforts to enrich the Arabic library with valuable books in various fields. I admired the choice of books, the quality of printing, the good translations and the careful editing. Still, I have no information about how far Arab readers have taken up these valuable books offered to them “on a golden platter”. As for opening up to other creative fields such as poetry, fiction and criticism, I support the idea, because there is a large readership interested in creative writing. The Organization should reach these readers too, and I believe it can, thanks to its outstanding experience in translation and publishing.
Source: “Turkey and its role in revitalising translation”, al-Arabiyya wa al-Tarjama, 2012. Translated from the Arabic for this site.