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F20 Black Atlantic: Resources, Pedagogy, and Scholarship on the 18th Century Black Atlantic

Early Language Competencies of Translators and Interpreters Looking at Muslim Slave Narratives

Translation and interpretation are processes that naturally come with hesitancies and questionings of all facets of the process. These parts including, the agents of the project, the approaches, and the commissioning of such projects. Arguably, these issues become even more prevalent when the source and target languages are of completely different language families and consist of different alphabets. Consider English and Arabic, for example. During colonialism, while these early linguistic exchanges are taking place, one cannot help but to contemplate how accuracy was regulated or assured. The reluctance to trust this accuracy stems from who is confirming the same. It is not uncommon for the story of the oppressed to become distorted, altered, or interfered with by nature of it being a slave narrative. This proposed research project would aim to serve as a type of quality assurance of texts in which the reader has been assured of its accuracy, not by the author, but by the voice claiming the authority to do so. The project would aim to explore the following points:

The language acquisition of all the agents involved in the rendered interpretations/translations. For example, there is mention of a Rev. Bird who was a missionary in Syria. Are we able to find out more about how he came into his knowledge of Arabic to be able to translate it into English?
Initial interpreters from Africa and their command of English.
The imposition of language and thus, imposition of a role such as an interpreter or translator.
From a translation studies perspective, in exploring the history of the challenges of this particular language pair, have they remained the same or been dealt with over time?

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