18 The Linguist Vol/63 No/4
ciol.org.uk/thelinguist
FEATURES
Historical records are often problematic in
nature, particularly when they originate from
colonial administrations. Dealing with such
records in translation raises a variety of ethical
as well as practical questions. The British
Library/Qatar Foundation Partnership (BLQFP)
project is digitising material from multiple
collections related to the history of the Gulf.
These digitised records are published in the
Qatar Digital Library (QDL) with enhanced
bilingual catalogue descriptions in English and
Arabic. The vast majority of the material comes
from the India Office Records (IOR), which
incorporates the archival records of the English
East India Company and the India Office. They
span centuries of colonial activity across
different continents, cultures and peoples.
In trying to describe this material,
cataloguers and translators on the BLQFP
recognised the potential for a position of
'neutrality' to morph into complicity with the
colonial administration. These in-house teams
had been grappling with individual questions
of terminology for years, but in 2020 there
was an opportunity to build on emerging
approaches and resources to develop a
dedicated and evolving set of guidelines for
conscientious bilingual description (CBD).
In the CBD process, potentially offensive
and/or problematic terms are identified and
thoroughly researched before being
categorised into one of four levels: not
problematic, sometimes problematic,
always problematic, and problematic and
offensive. The guidelines then provide
recommendations on how to treat the terms
in both English and Arabic.
Levels of treatment include using quotation
marks and providing additional context in
parentheses, and/or adding the term to the
QDL's hyperlinked bilingual glossary to
provide more information. The most complex
terms require such extensive historical and
linguistic contextualisation that they warrant
longer-form exploration under the QDL's
Decolonising the rec
How the British Library is approaching the delicate task of translating their arc
IMAGES
©
SAM
WALTON
