Translation in exile
Afghan knowledge production after August 2021
This event is part of a demonstration of what Lera offers for running knowledge events. Its content is written with care and draws on real sources, but the conference has not taken place, and apart from the convener its participants are fictional.
Since 15 August 2021, when the Taliban took Kabul, the girls of Afghanistan have been pushed out of education step by step: first from secondary school, and in December 2022 from university. In August 2024 UNESCO estimated that at least 1.4 million girls had been deliberately deprived of secondary education. Afghanistan is the only country in the world that bars women from secondary school and university. At the same time, a large share of the country's professors, writers, translators and publishers left or fell silent.
What followed is a new form of knowledge production that works outside the borders and for those inside them. Secret home classes, online courses for girls, and publishers in Iran, Germany and Pakistan who publish textbooks and literature for readers in an Afghanistan in which they themselves can no longer live. In this network translation has a double role: it carries the world's knowledge into the language of a girl whose school is closed, and it carries the voices of Afghan writers to a world that knows them only through news of war.
This knowledge is fragile. PDF books pass from hand to hand with no translator's name, no identifier and no history of versions. When the website of a publisher in exile closes, everything goes with it. When a translator removes their name out of fear for their family, their work is left without an owner. Edward Said called exile an "unhealable rift" between a human being and their native place; for knowledge, that rift begins with the loss of addresses and names.
I propose an infrastructure that guarantees three things: that every translation is a display of one work with a stable identifier; that the translator's name, or their pseudonym if their safety requires it, always stays with the work; and that copies are kept in several places, so that shutting down one server does not mean erasing a library. The knowledge made in exile is the knowledge of Afghanistan, and one day it must return there.
Questions for discussion
- How can translators and writers who work under pseudonyms be protected without losing their authorship and the credit for their work?
- What obligation do European educational institutions have towards Afghan women who study remotely?
- Will the knowledge produced outside the country one day find its way into the education system inside it?
References
PBS NewsHour / Associated Press. 2024. "Taliban deliberately deprived 1.4 million Afghan girls of schooling, United Nations agency says." August 2024.
Said, Edward W. 2000. "Reflections on Exile." In Reflections on Exile and Other Essays. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Cronin, Michael. 2006. Translation and Identity. London: Routledge.