العربية
The Importance of Translation in the Modern Era
The role that translation has played in enriching the cultural, social, scientific, and cultural life of various nations cannot be denied or ignored. Translation has played a civilizational, cultural, and scientific role since the dawn of human history. It continues to play this role to this day and will continue to do so as long as humans exist on Earth. Anyone who follows the development of human civilizations and the growth of human scientific progress will find that translation is a phenomenon that precedes every civilizational achievement of any nation and continues to keep pace with that nation’s civilizational growth. Emerging countries striving to join the ranks of progress are keen to transfer the secrets of various technologies, industries, and sciences into their own languages. This allows them to be made available to their people in their native language, enabling them to then move on to the stage of thinking, development, progress, and advancement. The contemporary world has posed a grave challenge to developing countries, facing a choice between survival through continuous scientific progress or perishing amidst the rubble. Only translation can build bridges across which human achievements can be conveyed.
Translation plays a role in overcoming the challenges facing the scientific research movement in our Arab world. It offers mechanisms through which we can bridge the knowledge gap we suffer from and provides a tributary through which this movement can be enriched. Scientific research is the means by which problems can be solved, new facts discovered, and laws and theories deduced.
The translation movement in the modern era has had an undeniable impact on raising the scientific and cultural level of the current generation. However, there is a significant disparity in the degree of interest in this movement among Arab countries. Furthermore, this movement in our countries, in general, is less prevalent than in developed countries. The Arab League Educational, Cultural and Scientific Organization (ALECSO) conducted a survey of foreign books translated between 1970 and 1980. It found that the total number of translated books amounted to 2,840, of which 62% were translated in Egypt, 17% in Syria, 9% in Iraq, and 5.4% in Lebanon. This survey also revealed that the percentage of translated books on basic and applied sciences did not exceed 14%, while the percentage of translated books on literature, fiction, philosophy, and social sciences exceeded 70%. Undoubtedly, the low percentage of translated scientific books is due to the fact that all Arab countries, with the exception of Syria, have not Arabized university education.
The translation movement has not reached maturity and completion in terms of linguistic integrity and accurate representation of the translated book’s meaning. However, when government institutions were established to oversee the selection of foreign books for translation, competent individuals were chosen to advance them, and translations were reconsidered for reform, quality books translated into Arabic began to appear.
The goals of translation in the Arab world are summarized in emphasizing the unity of the Arabic language, its ability to express the needs of the times, and its inclusion on the list of internationally recognized world languages.