The Politics of Translating the Arab Spring: Translation as an Agency to Contest Authoritarianism in MENA: A Critical Introduction
[Thesis]
Lotfi Zekraoui
Price, Joshua M.; Larémont, Ricardo R.
State University of New York at Binghamton
2017
129
Committee members: Ghaemmaghami, Omid; Scholtz, Andrew
Place of publication: United States, Ann Arbor; ISBN=978-0-355-08386-6
Ph.D.
Translation Research and Instruction Program
State University of New York at Binghamton
2017
The MENA region has witnessed unprecedented political and social events that started with a youth revolt in Tunisia in December 2010 and was followed by a series of uprisings spanning the whole region in the following months. Historians, political scientists and sociologists have attempted to study this so-called 'Arab Spring' each from their disciplinary perspective; however, few, if none, of these perspectives has paid considerable attention to the linguistic dynamics of the peculiar nature of this conflict and the role translation has played in it. As a translation scholar and the translator of one of the very first accounts on the Arab Spring, I comparatively study the Arab Spring as a story drawing on narrative theory to advance recent research at the intersection between translation and conflict. While my work is not the first application of narrativity in translation studies, my dissertation is a response to recent relevant scholarship and an attempt to advance the theory itself. 'The Arab Spring' as a case study is also an unprecedented topic to be explored both in translation studies and narrative theory.