I must confess that I approach my topic with some fear and trembling as I am neither a translator, nor a literary critic, nor a linguist, nor a specialist in any of these fields, in the first place.

In my study and work, I have certainly depended heavily on all kinds of translations from a whole variety of languages, and I am very thankful for that; but whatever translations I did do myself were almost always from English and French into Arabic and vice versa and primarily for personal use in my own research and writing. This is why I make this apology as I have no real competence to speak about translation either as an art or a science or a skill or a technique.

What drew me to this whole topic was my participation in a colloquium convened by SOAS and Alecso in London in 2010, dealing with the translation of Arabic literature to European languages. This led me, in turn, to a reading of Umberto Ecco's reflections on what translation is all about in his instructive and illuminating book Experiences in Translation, where he muses over his experiences both as translator and as translated. A weird, enigmatic and puzzling statement by Ecco, arrested my attention, he says:

Normally, theories are said to be either confirmed or falsified or temporarily suspended by reference to data, facts, experience and reality in general. But Ecco seems to be saying the exact opposite, namely that although translations, in fact, happen all the time, still the theories of language that deny the possibility of such an occurrence are “sensible” (i.e., valid and/or true) and “rigorous”. So, I feel entitled to ask what kind of a “theory” is this that flies so violently and blatantly in the face of as common a fact and universally acknowledged occurrence as translations between the languages of our world. My immediate intuitive reaction to all that is to say dismissively, then, so much the worse for “theory”.