ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses translation practice and theory through consideration of Tahrir Documents, a project to push the boundaries of Arabic-English translation and begun in the aftermath of the 2011 Egyptian uprising against Hosni Mubarak. Working with a collection of paper-based ephemera produced during the revolution, Tahrir Documents complicated the increasingly widespread characterization of the direct actions in Tahrir Square as a revolution fueled by social media platforms. Tahrir Documents was an experiment in large-scale crowd-sourced translation that negotiated the demand for faithful, careful renderings of Arabic political speech into English alongside a pressing desire for immediate distribution.
In this chapter, we engage in a conversation with recent theoretical engagements from the emerging field of Arabic translation studies. First, we offer an overview of our process and some reflections on the numerous issues that our collectors, translators and editors faced over the course of the archive’s creation. Then, we build off these concrete details to advance an alternative, if tentative, theory for how to practice Arabic-to-English translation in a rapidly changing, revolutionary political context like Tahrir Square. We argue that revolutionary practices like those performed in Tahrir Square demand an approach to translation that prioritizes speed and accessibility over academic contemplation and deliberation.
