Professors cite need for Arabic translators

Tuesday, March 25, 2003 | 9:28 a.m.

While American voices rise in support and opposition to the war in Iraq, literature professors at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas wonder if a gulf of ignorance between countries could be bridged by more translators.

The United States may be poised for a tragic failure just as the ancient Greek civilization fell because its leaders failed to listen to reason while exercising what appeared to be limitless power, Thymios Carabas, Community College of Southern Nevada English professor, said.

The clash of American hubris and foreign nations was debated in a University of Nevada, Las Vegas lecture hall Monday night.

American culture is contained and controlled behind a wall of information that overwhelms citizens daily, Douglas Unger, author and associate professor of English, said.

"It's a terrible event," Unger said of the war in Iraq.

Unger, who heads UNLV's creative writing program and the International Institute of Modern Letters, said that there are only 20 literary interpreters who can translate Arabic in the world. There is one student at the university's institute, who is studying Palestine and its literature.

Days after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, federal officials issued a heightened alert for Boston as a possible target, but later discovered they had made a mistake in the translation.

"We don't read their language, we don't understand their culture, how could we know what we are doing?" Unger asked at the University Forum lecture.

Before the first Gulf War, President Saddam Hussein hosted an international conference of poets in Iraq, Unger said. "Thousands came to hear Americans and Europeans read," he said.

English-speaking countries dominate the world through book cartels such as Barnes & Noble and Borders bookstores that create "a leveraged corporate buyout of world culture," Unger said, by failing to offer books in other languages.

"We teach students not so much in how to read the world, but how to read themselves," Unger said.

The International Institute of Modern Letters is a marriage of foreign language scholars and creative writers who are trying to bridge the gulf between English as the dominant language and foreign writers who are unknown to most Westerners.

Next year the institute will use $100,000 in grants and donations to select books by exiled authors and translate them. Then, because translation is a two-way street, the author's work will be published in his or her native tongue and sent back to the originating country, Unger said.

The institute sees the act of translation "not as babble, but as sacred tongues," Unger said.

Italian scholar Guiseppe Natale said that translators need to know not only the culture, language and author of an original work, but have the same depth of understanding of the intended audience.

The word "jihad" to most Americans means a holy war, Natale said. "Actually, it means a global strategy or a global approach," he said.