2translators Between Two Arabic Translators Interviews Michelle Hartman Resources for Translators Yasmeen Hanoosh

Translation, Politics, and Solidarity – ARABLIT & ARABLIT QUARTERLY

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November 22, 2025

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Translation, Politics, and Solidarity

Between Michelle Hartman and Yasmeen Hanoosh

In this “BETWEEN TWO ARABIC TRANSLATORS” conversation, Yasmeen Hanoosh and Michelle Hartman discuss how the conceptual framework of solidarity raises important questions about translation, what it means to share (or not share) political commitments with an author, and ways of making co-translation equitable.

Yasmeen Hanoosh: Tell us about your journey as a multilingual reader, educator, scholar, and translator. Do you remember a point in your life when you transitioned from being monolingual to bilingual or multilingual or have you always been exposed to more than one language?

Michelle Hartman: I have a background that is strongly English-language dominant, but one in which I was exposed to many languages and encouraged to be bi/multilingual from a young age. For example, I attended a pre-school that taught French and had a dedicated French-language room. In my middle school, all students were also required to learn Spanish. Since childhood I have always been fascinated by language, words, and communication and sought out ways to explore this, including through travel. So, while I was always aware that I was an English speaker from a young age, I aspired to be a speaker of as many languages as possible and enjoyed language learning and exploration.

YH: What is your relationship with English, French, and Arabic now (and other languages)? Who or what do you credit for the linguistic and literary skills and accomplishments you enjoy today?

MH: If I can continue from my previous answer a bit, I pursued language study and exposure throughout my childhood and young adulthood, first through French, which was the language after English most available and accessible to me. I credit my very favorite teacher in high school with my early love for French and lasting connections to the language. She was a vibrant and compelling teacher (and person!) and really tried to bring all the best of French language, culture, and literature to her students in Michigan where I was in high school. This went well beyond just grammar lessons in the classroom. I followed my study of French all the way through university level, which is where I also took up Arabic. Arabic started off as an “option” in my undergraduate studies. I was interested in it, thanks to earlier exposure to Arabic in high school through friends and classmates. I thought I would give it a try at university.

Once again, it was the teachers and professors who taught Arabic language and literature who really conveyed their love for everything related to Arabic language, literature, and culture. Their passion for Arabic really shone through inside and outside of the classroom. This is how I was encouraged initially to go and study at the University of Damascus, which was a transformative experience for me as a learner of Arabic, someone who loves literature, and as a person. It was my luck to have been mentored by those committed and inspiring people and I really give them the credit for sharing this with me. Over time, I have dabbled in trying to speak a number of other languages as well but never to a very proficient level—Italian, Hebrew, Yiddish, and a bit of Urdu.

YH: So fascinating what the various human connections can inspire us to pursue! Do you think that knowing both French and English has given you access to additional layers of modern Arab culture—considering that some regions were exposed to French colonialism, others to British colonialism, and yet others to both systems of cultural hegemony? I am thinking of layers of cultural hybridity that are less visible to translators who can work between Arabic and only one of the two western colonial languages.

MH: I talk to young people, especially students, about this all the time. Even just linguistically, we know that speaking, reading, and understanding more than one language makes it easier to learn other languages. Therefore, it stands to reason that having access to more cultural information will open you up to more worlds and ways of thinking, making it easier to access others. Of course, in the case of French, English, and Arabic there are also all the direct ties and links—especially because of the colonial histories. But it’s not just this direct legacy and the many ways in which the languages, cultures, and histories are explicitly connected which is important. The more you expose yourself to and immerse yourself in languages and cultures, the more open and receptive you can be to others—I believe this. Learning more languages can help us to make ourselves more flexible speakers and also thinkers, and hopefully people with larger and broader world views. I think implied in your question is more than just linguistic skills and competencies, however, but also these “less visible” elements of society and culture that come from exposure, immersion, and a wider world of experiences linked to speaking more languages. We often underestimate the unspoken or unsaid things in language and culture and living and working “between worlds” is a way to have access to more of these—even if it is from initially not understanding them.

YH: This makes me think of Elias Khoury’s last novel, A Man Like Me, which I am currently translating. The unspoken within the catastrophic Palestinian experience and within language itself is a major leitmotif that runs throughout the novel. This also leads me to want to ask you about your approach to the political in your work. Your publications—be they translations or scholarly—reflect keen attention to certain political concerns such as women’s rights, ethno-racial representation, and (post)colonial subjectivities. How/why did these focal points materialize in your work?

MH: When I look back over a relatively long period of work—both scholarly and translational work –I can see that I have both chosen to be committed to working with and on certain issues and questions explicitly and have been drawn or compelled to devote myself to them as well. So it is both a choice and not a choice. When you ask about how these focal points of my work materialized—attention to women’s rights, ethno-racial representation, (post)colonial subjectivities—I would have to give you an honest and direct answer that they came about organically, not per se as a “choice.” I did not sit down and say: “I want to be a translator who pays attention to politics,” or, “I am going to study women’s rights.” In fact, I would not even have thought of the categories of ethno-racial representation or (post)colonial subjectivities as focal points of my work … though I can see why those could be categories that I fit into.

At the same time, I am and always have been conscious and aware—even as a young student and scholar—that I was someone working in the frame of “political commitment.” When I was younger, though, I probably would not have used these exact words. They feel a bit academic or theoretical as a way to express something that is more intuitive to me. In today’s terms, probably we are more likely to use terminology like “social justice” to express the way I hope to focus my work and concerns. Frameworks and lingo have changed since I was a student and when I began translating (!) but the basic ideas have remained the same. It is not a surprise therefore that you see different kinds of issues and themes arise both organically and as choices in my scholarly and translational output—women’s rights, challenges to settler colonialism, solidarity with Palestine, racial equality, and so on. Working in literary studies, and in translation studies as well as literary translation itself, it is not always obvious what role such political commitment does and/or should play—and this is a contested topic in our field/s as you know well. I am interested in raising these questions in scholarly and translation circles, bringing them up explicitly and debating them. This is one of the productive uses of our energy as academics and translators, in my opinion.

YH: I wish these topics were just contested and genuinely debated among scholars who hold different worldviews. It seems to me that we’re living a dark moment where many scholars are using their institutional connections and applying their knowledge selectively to advance anti-Arab, anti-Palestinian repressive political ends, including denouncements and bullying of colleagues they disagree with on political grounds. This also leads me to think about the antithetical approach to the current academic violence that we must navigate—humanization and solidarity with each other. How do you develop your relationship/relationality to Arab texts/authors/cultures/worlds? Has the process transformed over the years as you gained more translation experience and as your social networks broadened?

MH: This is a really interesting question that I have been thinking about more as I have aged. I think I am a better translator now, after doing it for years… I hope so at least. In any case, at this stage in my life and work as a translator I find it more natural and to some extent “easier,” though I hesitate to call translation ever “easy,” even casually or as a shorthand. Of course, some of this is likely due to experience—when you do something more and more you know the tips and tricks, literary translation is neither simply mechanical nor simply artistic inspiration—it is a combination of these and a lot of meticulous and even obsessive work.

To get more directly at your actual question though, I think that some of the ways in which my translation experience and language experience and exposure have broadened of course is through social networks, through knowing more people, reading more books, listening to more podcasts, and so on. I attend literary events and lectures, but I also just hang around and talk to people and participate in life in the same Arabic-language worlds that the authors who I translate do, as well as in the places and contexts where their texts circulate. This itself deepens my relationship with individual authors and texts, as well as the culture/s and worlds they are connected to.

In some cases, I have also pursued more immersive experiences. One summer, I lived with the author whose text I was translating in her family house in a small Lebanese village so we could work together on the translation. We worked on the text together, every day, over the course of about a month in an immersive style. This is an opportunity that can be difficult to carve out. For me and for us, it was very meaningful and led to us building many elements of our ongoing relationship, not just as author-translator but also as friends and colleagues. I have built many long-lasting friendships with the authors I have translated. Of course, the people are all different, and our relationships are all different. But I do try to seek out, cultivate, and maintain deeper conversations and experiences rather than just taking the words on the page and transferring them to another language while asking a few questions along the way. I have been so fortunate to have worked with truly remarkable, generous, and brilliant women in the many translations I have done.

YH: These authors are also fortunate to have such a dedicated and passionate translator! You have recently translated a novel by an author from Gaza, but even beyond that, has the genocidal campaign in Gaza these past two years shifted the dynamics of translation and politics, or translation and solidarity, in any significant way for you, your author(s), and other collaborators?

MH: Speaking about both—who is lucky and the remarkable, generous, brilliant women I have worked with—is the perfect way to mention this most recent translation that I worked on with co-translator Caline Nasrallah. She certainly fits that description! As does the author of the novel itself, A Long Walk from Gaza, Asmaa Alatawna. Working with Asmaa has been an honor. Honestly, whenever Caline and I talk about the experience, we always say this. I really have to mention her courage and bravery in writing the novel and also for the dignity with which she has carried on as a person from Gaza (now living in France) during the horrific two years we have all been witnessing unfold in Gaza. The whole dynamics of finalizing the translation of A Long Walk from Gaza in autumn 2023 was completely different from anything I have done before, as we all had a new reality to cope with as we put the finishing touches on the translation of the book, including choosing a title in English.

And if I understand your question well, you are asking about a larger question, in addition to the politics of solidarity, and how this impacts the world of Arabic-English translation. From my perspective, there are several pieces to this question that might be interesting to think about, and I’d love to hear your take.

The dramatic nature of the escalating genocide in Palestine, focused on Gaza, has garnered much more attention throughout mainstream North America and other English-speaking contexts than ever before. From my perspective as an Arabic-English translator who has been actively engaged in the Palestinian solidarity movement for decades, it was striking how all of a sudden people all around me, who never particularly cared about or recognized what I worked on, started to pay attention. So a movement that was relatively ignored by the mainstream—and a similarly marginalized part of translation work worldwide—became something that many people started to see and think about. This itself is a major shift and change. How much of a change is still debatable in North American contexts… but I believe it is fair to say that there has been a change in the visibility and interest in Palestine within mainstream North American, English-speaking contexts.

YH: Yes, there is certainly a noticeable shift. Peter Beinart recently pointed out that perhaps there hasn’t been another political issue in the United States in the last couple of decades, other than maybe gay marriage, on which public opinion has shifted as fast as it is shifting on Israel-Palestine. Unfortunately for Palestinians, it has taken nothing short of a live-streamed genocide and a daily dose of slaughtered children to bring about this shift in public awareness—a shift that is still not matched by US academic and political institutions as we speak.

MH: Along with the shift in public opinion, I have found that there is a more open discussion of solidarity with Palestine—and even solidarity in general as a concept—in English-language spaces, especially in North America. As my political positions and commitments have always been open, clear, and loud, this has not particularly changed my preexisting relationship/s with the authors I work with. But we are now discussing and will continue to discuss the ways in which Arabic-English translation is implicated in these shifts and changes. How will we respond to this new attention? What are our new, or not new, responsibilities in the world where we live today? This might be in relation to Palestine and Gaza, or more generally in relation to how we think about changes in the region and the world that result from a genocide that the world has chosen to let unfold before our eyes, that world leaders tacitly condone against the loud screams of Palestinians and ordinary people in solidarity with them all over the world? I believe that it is our duty and responsibility as Arabic-English translators to hold and even lead these discussions about the genocide in the world of translation and translation studies, to push forward political messages of solidarity with Palestine and condemnations of the occupation, Zionism, settler colonialism, and oppression.

YH: What about the very real, palpable consequences of speaking out? For example, just last June I was doxed online for having sarcastically said “I am Hamas. We are all Hamas” during a casual exchange with a pro-Israel person that was caught on video. The utterance—clearly intended to mean the opposite; namely, that standing up against a genocide does not make us Hamas supporters—was taken out of context and used by pro-Israel and alt-right extremists to urge my university to fire me. Now, thankfully not all pro-Palestine voices have found themselves in this theater of the absurd, but the consequences of speaking against the genocide of the Palestinian people are real, especially in our North American academic contexts that are rife with genocide apologists. We have seen faculty members lose their jobs and students be suspended and deprived of earning their degrees, not to mention the unconstitutional detention of Mahmoud Khalil and others. How do you muster the courage to speak out despite this highly organized violence where university leaders choose complicity with genocidal regimes rather than the protection of their own campus communities?

MH: I am so sorry that you are going through this experience, Yasmeen, and honestly it can be discouraging, frustrating, and enraging to hear the stories from so many brilliant friends, colleagues, writers, translators, students—and other people of all kinds—who have been subject to silencing and repression for speaking up. Taking statements out of context, deliberately twisting sarcastic words, and trying to put words in people’s mouths are literally the very opposite of what you and I work on every day and try to make sense of as translators. This makes such an attack all the more difficult—it’s the opposite of who you are!

You ask about courage here. My “courage” is nothing compared to that of our friends, colleagues, and comrades in Palestine, especially in Gaza, who have been and are being displaced, starved, and murdered. We have lost so many people in this ongoing genocide and still are every day—including people close to us and our work as Arabic translators. I am sure you feel the loss of a colleague like Prof Refaat Alareer as I do. There is the human side of course, of a person being deliberately targeted and murdered by an occupying army. But there is also the professional side for us, as he was a professor of literature and a literary translator. For years, Prof Alareer worked translating, teaching, and mentoring young people in Gaza to be literary scholars and translators. So when I feel my own courage waver, I am being really honest here, I think about Alareer and other people like him. People who must be so scared living every day in Gaza. I think about any person who should be getting ready for the school year but does not have enough food to eat or feed their kids. We cannot lack courage to speak up in the face of this horror. It might feel far away but it’s not really, and we can’t let it be far away.

This does not mean that everyone has to do the same things in how they challenge what is going on. We each must act in the way/s that make the most sense for us. But we cannot stay silent, and we cannot do nothing. If our politics dictate that we stand with others, and if we are serious about solidarity with those who are oppressed, then this is the moment for us not to lose courage.

YH: Solidarity and politics provide a moral compass and, indeed, become a way of life. So, naturally, it seems, they have also emerged as conceptual themes that you have been passionate about throughout your career. As an Arabic translator who did not grow up in an Arab cultural context, do you think that successful translations are predicated on establishing a framework of political solidarity? In other words, can apolitical Arabic translators be successful translators based only on mastering translation as a craft or are political literacy and orientation toward social justice also required?

MH: I do not believe that there is such a thing as being apolitical. Self-proclaimed apolitical people are proclaiming a certain politics by denying them. We bring politics into everything we do. Having said that, not all politics might be framed or articulated as such, certainly when you do not explicitly identify or affiliate yourself politically this is a different way of engaging in the world, and one familiar to many academics, intellectuals, and translators. I think that a person can be a successful translator and master the craft of translation whether they hold particular political positions or not. I am sure there are successful right-wing translators as much as there are successful left-wing translators. I do not think every great writer or translator in history is orientated to social justice—certainly not. And I would not exceptionalize Arabic by saying that differently to other languages a particular political view should be a requirement to translate it. Having said that, I believe that if we are committed to translating Arabic, we should take careful stock of all of the political implications of it in the world and take very seriously the politics we engage in when we are translating.

Solidarity is one interesting way to think about our role as translators of Arabic. I have written and talked about solidarity as a concept in different ways and contexts in relation to scholarship and translation, and for me this is a framework that I find useful to think through when living and working as a translator of Arabic in a position of privilege in North America, though perhaps not one that is sufficient to cover all of the concerns we might have with the politics of translation. It is one way to imagine ourselves and possible relationships we might have to texts, authors, issues, and politics. But at the same time, claiming solidarity with Arabic—texts, authors, politics—is not enough for a translator, even or especially as one who did not grow up in what you here are calling “an Arab cultural context.” There is a lot more that goes into the craft of translation—experience, knowledge, skill, proficiency in language, culture, literature, and so on. As someone who did not grow up with Arabic, solidarity, affection, affiliation may be ways to build relationships, but they do not stand in for other skills needed.

On another level, solidarity is interesting as a conceptual framework. And it raises many interesting questions to think through as a translator: Is the solidarity perspective we are adopting as translators, related to a specific issue? Or are you in solidarity with the author and her struggles? Or are you in solidarity with the text itself as it travels from Arabic to English? Delving into this question might feel a bit obscure and theoretical but these are real questions for translators to contemplate that get at the core of our job—and our mission—as translators.

In my case, politically, I work on many issues and so being in solidarity and imagining this is not difficult. But what does this mean practically to my translation? If I say I am in solidarity with the Palestinian struggle, does this mean I translate more texts by Palestinian writers? Or works that depict the struggle in a certain way? When thinking about the actual art and practice of translation, imagining my solidarity with the writer—rather than the struggle—feels a more fruitful way to imagine what I am doing as a translator. But solidarity is a framework developed in political struggle more than as an individual one. So I am interested in the boundaries of that more individualized conception of solidarity which I believe is somewhat different than a collective, or political one.

This is perhaps why solidarity can be a provocative, engaging, and useful framework for us as translators to think about why and how we do what we do. This frame leads to other interesting questions. For example, should translators and authors have the same politics?

YH: That is such a great foundational question!

MH: Should we agree on things, and if so what and how much? Many of the women whose novels I have translated for different reasons express comfort in working with a woman translator. The same is true at times for certain political views. So perhaps having some level of commitment to some of the same questions and issues an author and her text are engaging with is a way to express something similar, if not exactly the same. I am open to many ways of thinking about this question, to be honest, and find different people’s answers fascinating to push my own forward.

YH: You got me thinking of what it means to translate a text with which we are politically misaligned. I guess this calls into view the wide range of purposes for which we translate—material gain, exposing or commenting on counterviews, or lack of interest in an explicit political position? This also makes me wonder about the social dynamics embedded within the act of translation. As an accomplished translator, you’ve been through a variety of different social dynamics governing your translation work. What are some of the power relations that emerge at the intersection of gender, ethnicity, class, native language, etc. with which we need to be careful as translators (especially those of us who also hold academic positions)?

MH: There are so many of these that I could mention and they are all important. But I think at the risk of rambling on too much, I would like to focus on the intersection of native language and assumed ethnicity and racialization within translation circles. As translators—especially those of us who hold academic positions—this also has an important intersection with class and privilege, which do not necessarily work together in obvious ways, but do of course work together.

What I am pointing to here is the fetishization of the notion of “mother tongue” and how ethnicity/race and perceived identities are linked to assumptions about language for translators. This is a feature of translation dynamics in Arabic-English translation that people do not like to talk about directly as it is uncomfortable in many ways. It brings “whiteness” to the surface of our discussions, and it also has a long and unpleasant history in our field.

The first element that I mention here is how we talk about and use mother tongue status in evaluating ourselves and others in relation to translation. Most people translate in one direction, which has often been defined as their “mother tongue” but might be called their first language or dominant language in other contexts. We have perhaps shifted to speaking about the “stronger” language, but there is a notion that we must have a language that we have such skill in and others that we might have less in and really define this culturally as translators as that which you were raised to speak.

Now in my case, this is very much the case. I can translate into English, but not into French and Arabic—the skill I have in writing these languages is considerably different and not at all equal. But other people have different experiences of language and bilingualism. Many people for example who are raised speaking Arabic, and it is their native language /mother tongue, also master English as a written language at the very highest level. Their linguistic abilities to translate into English would match mine as a “mother tongue” English speaker, but their own mother tongue is Arabic.

In translation circles, though, this perception then meets up with the way ethnicity and racialized identities are operationalized. There is a differential treatment, matching societal hierarchies and social relations, of people who are perceived to be Arabs or of Arab descent—by background, by last name, and so on—and those who are not, especially those people who are “white” or of European descent. This in most cases is preferential for the privileged—the white translator who has learned Arabic and is perceived to have “native” ability in English, over the Arab translator who may have the same ability in English, but will be assumed not to by virtue of their identity and the perception of their linguistic abilities because of this.

This dynamic is signaled in the co-translation work I have done with Caline Nasrallah. Our last names signal Nasrallah—native Arabic, and Hartman—native English. This is correct demographically. Caline is Arab, Lebanese, and I am not. And again, in my case, it is true that English is my strongest language. In Caline’s case, her English and Arabic are perfectly bilingual, and she has a similar level of French. She has linguistic skills and abilities, some which are hard to quantify, that are different and more advanced than mine. I have more experience of course in literary translation as I am (much ) older and read fiction obsessively. When we work together, therefore, we bring different things to the table. Working with, and having conversations with other, young, Arab-origin translators has revealed to me that the dynamics of ethnicity, racialization, and ideologies about language are still important in the world of translation and publishing.

YH: I’m glad you brought up your collaborative work with Caline Nasrallah. ‘Collaboration’ has emerged as a buzzword in translation circles in recent years, but mostly in the context of technological advances, fansubbing, and other online crowdsourced translation projects. Talk about the role of collaboration in your Arabic literary translations—you’ve collaborated with Caline Nasrallah on four book-length translations, the most recent of which is Asmaa Alatawna’s A Long Walk from Gaza. Aside from outside perceptions of language supremacy, how would you characterize this collaborative relationship? How did your collaboration with Caline start? What are some of the pros and cons of these collaborative endeavors?

MH: Caline and I met in Lebanon in that summer when I was living and working in Lebanon immersively on a translation, and then again when she moved to Montreal. At that time, Caline was a professional translator who was interested in literary translation. The first time we talked at length, I could tell that she had literary sensibilities, and I hired her for editing and proofreading some literary translation work I was doing. Her work was excellent; she not long after enrolled to do a master’s degree in theoretical translation studies at the institute where I work. So by the time I proposed working together on a literary translation as co-translators, we already knew each other very well. Because we’d worked together, she’d studied with me, and we talked all the time, I had the sense that we would make a well-matched translation team!

As I noted earlier, we have different linguistic and literary skills and backgrounds that fit together very well and we have well-matched political and literary interests, though again we are not exactly the same. Going into our first project, which was the book Without, we established very well-defined roles in the project to be very clear about how we would engage. In the end, that translation and the one that followed almost immediately, Memoirs of a Militant, were done during the COVID-19 pandemic, when we were both living in Montreal and not able to travel. This made it harder in some ways, but also easier because we were both “stuck” in one place and it was in some ways possible to devote many hours of “at home time” to translation. We finished much of these two translations at a long table that was more than two meters long, outside on my back deck, when there were rules about being inside each other’s houses! But we also did quite a bit of work on these translations as well as What the War Left Behind on Zoom.

YH: I imagine Montreal was not the warmest place for an outdoor literary translation endeavor!

MH: It’s probably less well-known how hot it gets in the summer. Luckily, we had a summer project in Without. For that novel, we agreed that we would each translate particular parts and then the other would work on that translated section and we would discuss. Because it is a multi-voiced work, this system worked well. We continued along similarly—though the divisions were more ad hoc—in the other two translations I mentioned. One of us would translate a section then we would meet and discuss and critique, coming up with a new translation that we both agreed on. I detail this experience because we decided to do something quite different when we decided to work on A Long Walk from Gaza together. In this translation, we actually both translated each section separately and then put the two full translations side by side and worked on a third version that would be our final version coming out of our two translations.

YH: That’s a lot of work. Not many translators can afford to go through so many iterations of the source text!

MH: Yes, obviously this is an immensely time-consuming process! But honestly, it is one of the most rewarding translation experiences I have had. We learned a lot in the process, as a team, and for me certainly also as an individual translator. One thing that we have noted and discussed is how often we would come up with the same translation—is it because we have worked together so much? Is it because we think similarly? Is it because that’s the “best” translation of a particular phrase? It is very generative to work on these questions.

YH: I can imagine. It’s wonderful to be able to turn a typically solo, silent task into a community-based, discussion-based project.

MH: It’s been so rare in my experience to be able to have such a project and honestly the co-translation work with Caline has been a hugely generative experience for me. The main con is the amount of time it takes, you work more and you work harder. But of course this is also the pro—the quality and amount of effort in each word and each line is well worked and very thought through. Perhaps at times that might be too much, and a given translation or translational moment might have been better off with less thought. In all, I believe that the work with Caline has led to translational possibilities and solutions that would not have been possible for me alone. And because translation can be such lonely work—it is lovely to have another person to ask all the questions, to obsess over things with, and generally to be in conversation with someone as devoted to a project as you are. I think of successful co-translation as a rare opportunity that I am grateful to have had.

YH: I am happy for you and Caline to have found each other. What you describe makes me want to find my co-translator! I’d like to ask you more about “Translaboration”. The concept brings attention to (im)material and discursive conditions of labor practices in the act of blending “translation” and “collaboration”. I’ve known you as someone who’s keenly invested in centering ethical practices in the work you do. Can you talk about the division of labor between and Caline or your other collaborators? How do you approach intellectual and financial equity? And what is your advice for others who are seeking collaborative work?

MH: Yes, how you work closely with another person, especially on things that are usually done solo or are conceived of usually as being done individually, is not obvious. And I have given a very positive answer to collaboration with Caline and believe we have developed a great working relationship. We share a lot in common in our politics, outlook on life, and way of working. But as I have already pointed out we are situated very differently hierarchically within the translation world—I have been around much longer, had already translated nearly a dozen novels when we began working together, and am a white professor who learned Arabic as a third language as a student, holding a great deal of privilege in translation circles. Caline is a student, and even studied with me, is younger, she has less experience and less privilege in these same circles. She has incredible linguistic skills and professional qualifications that are not necessarily valued or looked on as having the same clout or prestige, and she is of an Arabic-speaking, Arab Lebanese background, which also tends not to be looked upon favorably in North American literary translation circles.

To make our translation practice together equitably in terms of labor, we have always very explicitly talked about these issues at the very beginning of a project. We discuss the division of work—who will do what—not just in terms of who translates what first and so on, but also the invisible and extra work that attaches to projects, the emails to the publisher, the research on different elements of the book, and so on. Our financial arrangements are also discussed openly from the beginning. And all of these issues we also discuss with the authors whose works we are translating, so that everyone has a say in the equitable division of labor. Because I have experience in talking to authors, I tried to use the same principles in devising a system for Caline and me to work together.

My advice on this for colleagues and aspiring translators is in all work you embark on to discuss everything you can possibly think of transparently and as early as possible in the process. Try to take on any touchy or difficult issues directly and without delay. The process may not be perfect, and when translation and creation are done in the context of capitalism, it never will be.

YH: That’s a valuable piece of advice, and one that also reflects your extensive experience. as it is not easy to discuss everything in advance when one does not know fully what the process entails. Thank you for sharing these wise insights, and for the humility and awareness you bring to your situationality as a literary translator!