AMU students significantly contribute to the German literary translation project

ALIGARH: The students and teachers of the German Section, Department of Foreign Languages, Aligarh Muslim University (AMU) contributed significantly to the Translation Project conducted by Goethe-Institut, Max Mueller Bhavan, Mumbai.

The South Asian regional translation project, “Diamantenschliff: The Digital Translation Academy” focused on the translations of German literary works into the South Asian languages with special emphasis on the translation of selected works of Franz Kafka from German into various South Asian languages, including Bangla, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Sinhala, Tamil and Urdu.

Syed Salman Abbas, Assistant Professor, German Language and Literature, Department of Foreign Languages, who was the mentor for Urdu translationsmoderated a lecture session on translation delivered by Dr Almuth Degener, a retired professor from the Indology Department, University of Mainz, Germany.

The current and former students of the German Section, including Mohammad Uzair, Mohammad Khalid, Sadique Khan, Mohammad Intizar, Muhammad Fahad and Syeda Alina Ali translated different works of Kafka from German into Urdu, while Mr Syed Salman Abbas contributed to and edited the Urdu translations for the website.

Dr Subair PM, Assistant Professor, made contributions as one of the translators of German texts into Malayalam.

The one-year-long project concluded with the launch of the translations on the official website of Goethe-Instituthttps://www.goethe.de/ins/in/en/sta/mum/ap23/dia.htmlon July 3, marking Franz Kafka’s birthday. The voice recordings of the Urdu translations are also available on the website.

Prof Muhammad Azhar, Dean of the Faculty of International Studies and Chairman of the concerned department appreciated the unique achievement of the students and faculty members of the department and congratulated them for their outreach.