São Paulo – University of São Paulo (USP) professor Safa Alferd Abou Chahla Jubran accepted an award in Doha, Qatar last Sunday (8). Blog Orientalíssimo and the Al Jazeera TV website reported that she won the Sheikh Hamad Award for Translation and International Understanding for Best Translation from Arabic into Portuguese.
Award criteria include significance of the translated work, accuracy and precision, and stylistics and aesthetics. Established in 2015, the award gives away USD 2 million in cash prizes.
Competitors are divided into three categories – Translation Prizes, Achievement Prizes for individuals or institutions with substantive contribution to translation and international understanding, and Achievement Prizes for translations from Arabic into languages selected annually and from these languages into Arabic. Apart from Jubran, Catarina Belo of the American University in Cairo, Egypt also won an award for Portuguese translation.
The Lebanon-born Jubran moved to Brazil in the 1980s. She graduated from the USP, where she’s a full professor in Arabic Language at the Department of Oriental Languages. Apart from academic papers, she has also translated works like Two Brothers, by the Brazilian-born Lebanese descendant writer Milton Hatoum, into Arabic.
Safa and a fellow Brazilian – UFRJ professor Felipe Benjamin Francisco – also joined the 6th Congress on Translation and the Problematics of Cross-cultural Understanding, hosted in Doha by the Forum on Arab and International Relations in Qatar and attended by scholars from 130-plus countries.
Translated by Gabriel Pomerancblum
