ABSTRACT
I landed in Cairo for the first time on 1 October 1983, with a nine-month grant to study Arabic at the then newly founded French centre for the study of Arabic language known, in compliance with the French fondness for acronyms, as DEAC (Département d’étude de l’arabe du Caire). I had fallen in love with Arabic one year earlier, when I started learning it in Aix-en-Provence. One of my teachers there, noticing my eagerness to progress, had recommended that I try my hand at translation from Arabic into French and offer my help at the Centre d’ Études et de Documentation Économiques et Juridiques (CEDEJ), the French research centre in Cairo, which then published a Revue de la presse égyptienne, that is, two to three hundred pages translated from the Egyptian press on a quarterly basis. Little did I know, when I first met the editor of the Revue de la presse égyptienne a few weeks after my arrival in Cairo, that I was being caught in what would become my main secondary activity for many years to come. Since then, not only have I translated some twenty books, but I have also never ceased to reflect on this strange pastime. While this self-reflection has in many ways informed my research on translation matters – which have come to form an important part of my scholarly production over the years – most of it remained implicit, unsaid. As a scholar, one is supposed to put aside one’s own experience and subjectivity and write as if one did not play a major role in shaping both one’s research interests and the way one looks at them. I would like to take the opportunity of this Festschrift for a distinguished colleague to delve into this three-decade long experience in Arabic translation to explore key moments, situations, and figures that shaped my vision and my practice of translation, as well as my research in translation studies.
