Curriculum innovation in the Arab world : community interpreting and translation

The term ‘community interpreting’ denominates a field of practice and study of increasing significance among modern multicultural societies and geographically mobile populations. As encapsulated by Pöchhacker (1999: 126–127), ‘community interpreting refers to interpreting in institutional settings of a given society in which public service providers and individual clients do not speak the same language … community interpreting facilitates communication within a social entity (society) that includes culturally different sub-groups’. According to Gouadec (2007: 35), ‘Community translation encompasses all translating (and interpreting) carried out to facilitate inter-community relations within a given country where diverse linguistic (and cultural) communities cohabit’. These definitions refer in very general terms to multilingual community situations requiring language services, yet community interpreting and translation have been associated with a few prominent host societies to large numbers of immigrants and refugees; these include Australia, Canada, Sweden, the UK and, since the 1990s, Southern Europe. The literature on community interpreting and translation (e.g. Barsky, 1996; Hale, 2007; Niska, 2002; Taibi, 2011; Wadensjö, 1998) abounds with references to migrants, refugees, and language minorities as the main clients of community interpreters and translators. This association between community language services and mainly European and North American immigration settings is solidly entrenched – as my own experience attests. During much of my time as a community interpreter and translator in Spain in the 1990s and, subsequently, as a lecturer in the field in Spain and Australia, I gave little thought to the situation of the same professional services in the Arab world. Nor am I alone in this: during a meeting held at a Saudi university in 2014 to discuss research and training in community interpreting and language services for pilgrims, a Saudi MP commented that this was the first he had heard of community interpreting and translation and noted the attendant need to recruit qualified professionals to guarantee quality services. Effectively, working with Arabic in dominant Spanish- or English-speaking cultures can foster a unidirectional view of Arabic speakers as consumers only, simply because in (for example) Europe and Australia they are usually migrants or refugees who need interpreters to communicate with/access mainstream public services. Yet this paradigm must clearly be inverted in many other parts of the world: in Arab countries it is Arabic speakers who provide the respective public services and, generally, speakers of other languages who use them.