We are translators of literature, critical theory and social sciences from and into Arabic. We believe that translation is a way of seeing and knowing the world, and ourselves; that translation is a forum, a tool, a weapon, a refuge. We translate and we think about translation. We pore over maps and we recognize that the politics of translation is a rich topography that varies from place to place and history to history. We celebrate language and struggle to make it speak to the past and the future.

Turjoman is a Cairo-based translators’ collective founded in the summer of 2015 when core members came together to form a reading group in Translation Studies for literary translators working from the major European languages into Arabic.

The collective espouses the following principles: That translation is a complex form of knowledge-production in its own right, That the transfer of meaning undertaken in translation is situated at the intersection of a cultural and linguistic matrix, and that the translator is a committed intellectual based in a community of readers, writers, and thinkers.

Turjoman is an entirely self-funded project that relies to a great extent on the voluntary labor of its members. Turjoman activities revolve around three main projects: 

The Turjoman portal (https://turjoman.org/) is an educational, archival and news platform dedicated to creating a community of Arabic translators interested in experimental translation practice and contemporary translation theory. The portal publishes essays on translation, translation reviews, interviews with contemporary translators, a bio-bibliographical wiki on prominent and forgotten translators, and a glossary that features short essays by member and guest translators on selected keywords in translation. Turjoman.org is a virtual forum for writing about translation. We welcome short to medium length essays by working translators reflecting on their poetics and practice. The library offers bibliographies of seminal works in Translation Studies.

Turjoman Workshops are designed to create a critical interface between the theory and practice of translation in Arabic contexts and to develop collaborative translation pedagogies for students and practitioners. They are also intended to foster an inter-generational and professional sense of community, solidarity and mission among translators, to contribute to growing the Turjoman collective, and to publishing the work of emerging translators. Workshops are held over four to six months annually at the Cairo Institute of Liberal Arts (CILAS) and the feminist publishing house Hunna (Elles) and have produced a number of thematic anthologies of translated essays on themes like alternative higher education and black feminist theory.

Turjoman Books is a serial imprint which publishes translations into Arabic of classic and contemporary research and writing in the radical humanities and social theory in cooperation with Cairo-based presses. Turjoman aims to establish a print publication vehicle run entirely by and for translators, with translators being involved in the publication process, from selection of texts to be translated and supervising the editing of manuscripts, to managing the technical process of delivering manuscripts to print. The imprint is intended to offer a publication outlet for cutting-edge translated works in the humanities and social sciences, and literary works, that would not necessarily find a home in a conservative, profit-driven publishing market.

Turjoman Books was created to give translators the space and resources to develop these projects in an integrated format that emphasizes the central role of translation in knowledge-production. Translators are encouraged to make full use of paratext in translations for Turjoman Books, including critical introductions that reflect on the process of translation, footnotes, glossaries and any other form of experimental marginalia appropriate to the text, its target knowledge project and its intended readerships. 

The series was launched with the publication of Marcus Rediker and Peter Linebaugh’s The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Beacon Press, 2013/Al-Kotob Khan Press, 2023). In order to grow, Turjoman Books will need to source additional revenue streams due to the high costs associated with translation rights and publishing expenses.

Editorial board members of the Turjoman collective will review and select submissions based on 1) the significance of the source text in its home context and its relevance to the contemporary Arab/Egyptian intellectual and cultural milieu 2) the professional experience of the translator, the overall excellence of the translation, and its linguistic and formal innovation.

TURJOMAN EDITORIAL BOARD

Samah Selim is a teacher and translator of Arabic literature into English based in the United States. She is the author of The Novel and the Rural Imaginary in Egypt 1880-1985 (Routledge, 2004) and Popular Fiction, Translation and the Nahda in Egypt (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). She was awarded the Saif Ghobash-Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation in 2009 and the Arkansas Arabic Translation Award in 2011. Her most recent translation is Arwa Salih’s The Stillborn: Notebooks of a Woman from the Student Movement Generation in Egypt (Seagull Books, 2018). In 2018 Selim won a National Endowment for the Arts Translation Grant to translate Jordanian author Ghalib Halasa’s semi-autobiographical novel Sultana (1987). She teaches at Rutgers University’s Department of African, Middle Eastern and South Asian Languages and Literatures.

Hussein El-Hajj is a cultural activist and researcher in the field of radical pedagogy and alternative higher education. From 2015 to 2017 he worked as a librarian at the Cairo Contemporary Image Collective, and was Coordinator at the Cairo Institute of Liberal Arts and Sciences in Alexandria (CILAS Alex) where he also taught translation of the humanities and social sciences until 2024. He has published an Arabic-language poetry collection, Tuyuf / Spectres (2015), and his published translations include A User’s Guide to Demanding the Impossible by Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination (Yadawia for handmade books, 2018) and two online anthologies (2018) on alternative higher education in association with CILAS: On the Emergence of Pigeon Towers, and a collection of collaborative student translations, Education as Translation.

Mariam Naji is an emerging translator who is currently completing a Masters Degree at the American University in Cairo. She is a former fellow at the British Centre for Literary Translation Summer School (2024) and the Arabic Translation Mentoring Program by New Writing North (2021). Her translations include Stephanie Land’s Maid: Hard Work, Low Pay, and a Mother’s Will to Survive and The Guest List by Lucy Foley (Aseer al-Kotob, 2023) and she co-translated the edited anthology of feminist writings, How to make a feminist movement in your kitchen (Hunna, 2023).