“A sociological reading to the genesis of translating Arabic fiction into English”

The presentation sets out to examine the genesis of Arabic fiction translation into English as a socially situated activity. Works of Arabic fiction emerged in English translation in the early twentieth century. Since then, this intellectual field of activity has gone through four distinct, though overlapping, phases which will be discussed thoroughly. The field under study was subjected to both internal and external factors which formed and conditioned its structure and dynamics. Bourdieu’s sociological concepts of field and capital will be used as analytical tools to both describe and interpret the complexity of the translation activity in this field.

Abdel Wahab Khalifa is a doctoral candidate at the Centre for Translation Studies (CTS) and the Centre for Arabic, Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies (AIMES) at the University of Leeds. His research interests include the sociology of translation; translation historiography; translation motivation as well as literary criticism and Arabic, Islamic and Middle Eastern cultural and literary histories.

Email: a.w.khalifa13@leeds.ac.uk.