2005/06 Strategy

ARABOOKS Initiative 2005 -2006

Background The dimension of human development has surfaced again in recent years as the cornerstone of the future of Arab societies. With previous years, and in fact decades, focusing on catching up in terms of economics, the Arab world today is seen as being richer than it is developed. Apart from freedom deficits and obstacles to the empowerment of women, access to information and acquiring knowledge are considered to be of crucial importance. So far, gaining access to the Internet and achieving literacy in the electronic domain have been identified as strategic tools to broaden access to information and enable young people to acquire individual knowledge. The question of how to improve the quality of education has been dealt with in ways that postulate greater individual responsibilities, encourage creativity and an opening up towards the outside world. In this respect, translating into Arabic has come to reflect the degree of the Arab world’s intellectual and cultural relations with the outside world. In a broader perspective, this makes the publishing sector an important vehicle towards establishing knowledge societies.

Approach

1. Readership Survey

Based on comparative international research, book markets tend to expand when the readership base broadens. The book access ratio has an educational dimension (literacy, use of literary Arabic) as well as an economic dimension (per capita income), with the former being more decisive than the latter. As a first step, the current state of the reading public should therefore be examined in order to achieve an understanding of what constitutes readership in Arab countries and which are the primary channels of acquiring information today. This shall be done through a series of emipirical surveys of both qualitative and quantitative character. It is assumed that projects aiming at promoting translations ultimately depend on the ability of donors to identify the starting point of reading in the current situation. The surveys should cover a selection of at least ten countries that would be analyzed on the basis of a unified questionnaire, so that results would enable comparison between different country experiences and allow for tracking changes at a later stage by establishing time series.

timeframe: January 2005 – January 2006

2. South-South Translations

The cultural background of Arab countries is to some extent shared by other countries such as Turkey, Iran, India and others. Looking at neighbouring experiences – other than the European or American one – has remained limited, with North Africa focusing on frankophone intellectual producation and the Near East and the Gulf being oriented mainly towards publications of the English speaking world. Although there is no reliable data, the one that is available at UNESCO’s Index Translationum demonstrates that translations from non-Arab Muslim countries are predominantly on Koranic issues. Translating from Turkish or Persian into Arabic must therefore be considered a deficit, and it would be worth trying to stimulate interest in intellectual debates and cultural developments taking place at the non-European borderlines of the Arab world. As this approach is not self-evident to Arab publishers and even intellectuals, a program sponsoring South-South translations would require a systematic marketing approach by ways of using periodicals, magazines and newspapers in order to create a viable market niche. As a supplement to its grants and awareness-raising programs, Next Page will also launch a publishing mentoring program for the grant recipients with a primary focus on marketing and distribution. The program will seek to enlarge the base for promotion of its products by establishing co-operation with regional dailies and TV programs (such as Al Jazeera’s book program).

Timeframe: ongoing

3. Database on Translations

As elsewhere, translations are part of the overall book production in the Arab world. With the book industry being only marginally covered by institutions in charge of bibliographic documentation, translations, too, are not sufficiently documented. Taken together with the situation of a weak respect for copyrights, information on whether or not a work in a foreign language has been translated into Arabic is not readily available. It would therefore be advisable to support the documentation of book production in the Arab world, covering both original and translated works.

Timeframe: ongoing

4. Arabic Encyclopaedia

In original production as well as in translations, major deficits of the Arab book market are to be found in reference works. While there is a number of general and specialized dictionaries, there is only a small number of encyclopaedias offering substantial background information. An Arabic Encyclopaedia on the Internet could fill this gap.