Yasmin El-Rifae
June 12th, 2015, Muftah I walked through downtown Cairo on a quiet Friday morning in March 2015, late to a conference I had helped organize and a little bit anxious. The conference was about the political importance of translation – of language and concepts – in connecting protest movements to one another and allowing them to be narrated from within. We had tried to make the conference sound mundane to state authorities, who had issued our permits, but I was not entirely sure it would work.
By Ahmed Refaat Mada Masr, 15 March 2015 I first heard Mona Baker two months ago in a workshop organized by the Imaginary School Program at Beirut, the art space not the city. It was called: “Prefigurative politics and creative subtitling.”
During the three-hour event, Baker briefly summed up what she discusses more elaborately in her research project, “Translating the Egyptian Revolution,” which “examines the language-based practices that allow Egyptian protesters to contest dominant narratives of the revolution and, importantly, to connect with, influence and learn from global movements of protest.
