The President of Yarmouk University, Professor Islam Massad, sponsored the opening of the activities of the first international conference for translation studies entitled: "Translation in the Arab World: Challenges, Hopes, and Aspirations", which lasted for two days and was organized by the Department of Translation at the Faculty of Arts at the University. In his opening speech of the conference, Massad emphasized our need for an applied science of translation, an approach that not only transfers information, knowledge, and culture among peoples, but also provides Yarmouk graduates with the knowledge and skill to succeed in their translation careers. He then pointed out that translation is a functional approach to understand other peoples and cultures and interact with them, wishing that the conference contributes to the field of translation studies and enhances the participants’ as well as attendees’ knowledge and skill.
The Dean of the Faculty of Arts, Professor Musa Rababaa, said that the holding of the first international conference for translation embodies the University’s interest in translation as a field of knowledge that contributes to the interaction among civilizations and a tool for communication between peoples. He then pointed out that translation is a science whose borders and pillars are not known except by those who have experienced translation by practicing it. He also stressed that the role of informed and proficient translation in the era of digitization and artificial intelligence is getting very important due to huge developments in the field of technological communication.
Dr. Yasser Suleiman from the University of Cambridge delivered a speech on behalf of the participants in the conference praising the efforts of those in charge of organizing the conference and acknowledging their endeavor to motivate translation specialists to play a crucial role in bridging the rift, reuniting nations, and opening up several global horizons for cultural communication. Suleiman then pointed to the conference's interest in the regional dimension of translation by hosting several scientific papers dealing with the Hebrew, Persian, and Turkish languages, praising the invaluable benefit of the many scientific papers presented in Arabic on the role of the Arabic language in translational research.
In his turn, the head of the translation department, Professor Ahmed Al-Harahsheh, delivered a speech in which he said that translation is one of the most important means of transferring knowledge, culture, and ideas between civilizations. He also stressed the need for the translator to be free of personal and ideological opinions and positions when translating the text. He then pointed out that the conference aims at studying the challenges, hopes, and aspirations of translation in the Arab world as it scrutinizes the status of translation in the labor market.
The conference sessions, in which a number of academics, researchers, and translators from the United Kingdom, Northern Ireland, Switzerland, the Republic of Algeria, the State of Palestine, and the Kingdom of Morocco participated beside some Jordanian specialists, tackled several topics such as parallel texts, translation and communication between cultures, technology in teaching translation, and the reality of literary translation from Hebrew to Arabic, and from Arabic to Hebrew. The sessions also addressed topics like the process of pre-translation in the literary text, the problem of translating Persian cultural elements into Arabic, the employment of symbolism in Hebrew literary works, the history of translating the meanings of Holy Quran into Hebrew, translating Ophthalmic Terminology from Spanish into Arabic, challenges of the Legal Translator in the Age of Digitization, Discrimination and Shifting Emphasis in Translation, His Majesty’s Discourses: Translation as Narrative, Neuro-Machine Translation of Press Titles, and translation and Sign Language Interpreters.
