The UNESCO Chair in Translating Cultures at KFCRIS, supported by the Literature, Publishing and Translation Commission, held three workshops in October 2024. The workshops were attended by members of the Translating Cultures Lab (TCL) and involved researchers interested in translating cultures. The lab aims to bring together internationally recognized scholars and early-career Saudi researchers, who collaborate on publishing papers that explore the Chair’s 2024 theme “Rethinking Translating Cultures and Its Conceptual Framework “with a focus on knowledge transfer and translation between countries of the Global South. The workshops offered these researchers an opportunity to present their papers and receive feedback and recommendations from the lab members to refine them and prepare them for publication.

During the first and second workshops, six research papers were presented, addressing contemporary issues in translating cultures. Some papers focused on the narratives and their cultural variations, while others explored religious concepts and their equivalents in different cultures, such as the concept of "mahr" in Islam, as well as translating humor in literature through a case study of modern Saudi literature. Other discussions included reconceptualizing the foreignizing and domesticating literary translation of the Arab cultures, translation as a form of knowledge, and the translation of Plastic Arts into Arabic. The papers were presented by scholars from King Khalid University in Saudi Arabia, Indira Gandhi National Open University in India, Jagiellonian University in Poland, Mohammed First University Oujda in Morocco, and the Catholic University of America in the United States, and by an independent researcher from Australia.

The third workshop discussed several research papers that will be included in the edited volume currently being prepared by the TCL focusing on the theme of “Rethinking Translating Cultures.” The UNESCO Chair perceives “translating cultures” as a concept that engages with broader debates in the humanities and recognizes it as an ongoing process involving translation, transmission, cross-cultural communication, and knowledge dissemination. The researchers’ papers addressed various topics including history, culture, and translation.  The first paper explored the connection between translating cultures and literary knowledge and the Nahda, while the second paper traced Naṣreddīn Ḫōcā’s journey across cultures, and the final paper examined the connection between translation and the rereading of Medieval Islamic cookbooks through the lenses of foreignization and transcreation. Through this edited volume, the Chair seeks to reimagine the epistemological turn that translating cultures has taken in the twenty-first century and encourages theoretical discussions that explore the cultural and interdisciplinary discontinuities and the untranslatable in between.