Interview An interview with Professor James Dickins on the teaching of translation

James Dickins is Professor of Arabic at the University of Leeds, UK. He has a BA in Arabic and Turkish from the University of Cambridge (1980) and a PhD in Arabic Linguistics from Heriot-Watt University (1990). He taught English at Gezira Aba Higher Secondary School for Boys in Sudan from 1980-1982, and has taught Arabic and Arabic>English translation at the University of Cambridge, Heriot Watt University, and the universities of St. Andrews, Durham, Salford and Leeds. He is currently Professor of Arabic at Leeds. His publications include Standard Arabic: an advanced course (1998, with Janet Watson), Extended axiomatic linguistics (1999), Thinking Arabic translation (2002; 2nd edition 2016, with Sandor Hervey and Ian Higgins), and Sudanese Arabic: phonematics and syllable structure (2007).


Interview
Interviewer: You have taught Arabic-English translation since 1986, that is an impressive 31 years.Throughout these years, did your teaching techniques and approaches change?If yes, how and why? James Dickins: I think my teaching techniques have changed.I hope that I now allow students to talk more, and constrain myself to talk less.I remember many years ago being told by a student who had been a teacher themselves that I had too much 'TTT' (teacher talking time).Ever since then, I have tried to make sure that I allow the students to talk more.was necessary to copy any material which needed to be shown to the class onto an acetate.Now, translations can be projected directly onto a board from a computer document, whether this is a Word document a PowerPoint presentation slide or something else.It is also much easier to do handouts now than when I first began teaching.Not only are photocopiers connected to computers, but they are able to staple as well as copy very quickly and reliably; when I first began teaching, photocopiers were very unreliable -and jammed and broke down with great regularity!Computers also make it possible to communicate with students outside class and at a distance, so that aspects of teaching can be done at any time, not just during class hours.
One potentially negative aspect of having taught for so long is that a teacher can become stuck in their ways, and unwilling to develop new teaching techniques.Bad habits, as well as good ones, can be made permanent.I hope this hasn't happened in my case!
Interviewer: Would you say teaching translation is the same regardless of the pair(s) of languages students work with?Or is it tailored to each language pair to consider the cultural and linguistic variations of that specific case?
James Dickins: I think that teaching translation must to some extent be tailored to the language pair with which one is dealing -though there are, of course, general principles which apply both to teaching generally and teaching translation in particular.One of the interesting points about the Thinking Translation series is that the same general translation principles have proved to be usable with many language pairs, involving both European languages (French, German, Spanish and Italian), and Arabic.Since I first began teaching translation a great deal more research has been done on translation pedagogy as a set of skills in its own right.Previously, translation teachers had to rely on insights from language teaching pedagogy (some of which were not really appropriate to translation teaching), plus techniques which they themselves had developed for teaching translation.
With regard to teaching Arabic-English translation there are certainly specific issues which are not found in dealing with some other language pairs.The same will be true, of course, for all language pairs, even if the two languages in question are linguistically and culturally close to one another.
Interviewer: What is specific to teaching translation with Arabic-English language pair?James Dickins: Specific issues can be linguistic (in the narrow sense), discoursal or more general.One example of a linguistic issue is the different uses of coordination in Arabic and English, and the implications these have to teaching Arabic-English translation.Another example of a specific issue is the translation of tenses between Arabic and English.Arabic makes principle use of two basic tenses, the past and the imperfect -the latter being extensively employed even where referring to past time.English has a much more complex tense system, involving not only multiple tenses (present, present perfect, simple past, pastperfect, etc.), but also a distinction between punctual and continuous tenses.Unlike Arabic, English also has very rigid rules of the use of tenses.The complexity of the English tense system often presents a challenge when translating from Arabic to English.
Discoursally, Arabic differs from English in many ways.In the pre-modern period, the genres of Arabic were quite different from those of English, making it difficult even to find an appropriate target genre for some Arabic texts.A good example is the translation of a traditional Arabic maqama into English.In the modern period, of course, genres have moved more close together, as Arabic has adopted from Western cultures genres such as the novel, the short story, or popular science.Even in relation to modern texts, however, differences in typical writing style between the two languages within a particular genre can cause significant translation problems.In many genres, Arabic, for example, continues to make (as it did in the pre-modern period) extensive use of forms of parallelism, which are not nearly so common or complex in English.Producing adequate English translations of these which do not entirely lose the semantic content or the rhetorical effect of these is a significant challenge.
A more general issue is that of cultural differences between English-speaking cultures and Arabic-speaking ones (which are obviously much larger than the differences between those of different European cultures), and the implications which these have for teaching Arabic-English translation.A good example is what people say when they meet a friend who has had their hair cut.In Arabic, it is standard to say ‫ﻧﻌﯿﻤﺎ‬ na'iman, the reply to which is ‫ﷲ‬ ‫اﻧﻌﻢ‬ ‫ﻋﻠﯿﻚ‬ an'am allahu 'alaik.This is difficult to translate idiomatically into English, not only because English does not have a standard formula (still less a standard reply) which someone says to another person who has had their hair cut, but also because other usages, which one might think of such as 'congratulations' are likely to sound unnatural in the context.

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probably also now use more group work than I did when I first began teaching Arabic-English translation.Teaching in some ways becomes easier over the years, both because the teacher has experience of almost any situation which can turn up in the class, and because teachers acquire an ever larger stock of teaching materials which they can draw on.Technology has also made teaching easier.When I first taught Arabic-English translation, it Alsaleh Bellaterra Journal of Teaching & Learning Language & Literature.11.4 (Nov-Dec 2018) ISSN 2013-6196