A knowledge of cultural identity, historical context, and the publishing decisions that shape which works are available to foreign readers, researchers, and translators is needed, they said at the 45th Sharjah International Book Fair (SIBF 2026).
The session, organised by Kitab Magazine and led by Ali Al-Ameri, brought together Dr Safa Jubran, Dr Mhamed Dahi, Dr Sana Darghmouni and Haitham Hussein to discuss the prospects and challenges facing Arabic literature in translation.
Dr Safa Jubran is a Lebanese-Brazilian academic and literary translator working between Arabic and Portuguese. For her, translation must retain cultural and political connotations that straight linguistic equivalents can’t always convey.
Translation is not just a question of finding an equivalent word in another language. It's about getting the soul of the expression, the context and the world that it's coming out of," she stated.
Moroccan literary critic Dr Mhamed Dahi spoke about the importance of translators in disseminating Arabic literature to foreign audiences, highlighting French translations of works by Naguib Mahfouz.
He emphasised the contributions of Arab intellectuals and diaspora members educated in Western countries, as well as Orientalist translators who helped introduce Arab literature to foreign readers.
The journey of Arabic literature into other languages has been carried, in large part, by people who understood both its cultural foundations and the literary traditions of the languages into which it was translated,” he told the audience.
The role of translation is to challenge the historical representations of Arab societies as exotic or fundamentally different from European cultures,” said Dr Sana Darghmouni, a Moroccan professor of comparative literature who has translated Mahmoud Darwish’s writings into Italian.
Literary translation has helped us move beyond these limited representations by showing the diversity of Arab literature and by placing Arab experiences.
