After working in Oman for more than 30 years, I feel obliged to share my experience as a translator of news and opinion articles for official media establishments under the Ministry of Information.
Actually, I first worked as an English language teacher, Ministry of Education in the 1980s and 1990s, the period during which I also worked on a part-time basis for Oman Daily Observer. In 1999, I joined the Oman Daily Observer, the nation’s then only English daily, as a full-time translator. That time, Oman News Agency (ONA)’s late English bulletin did not exist and there were no websites, so Oman Observer was the only medium of written official news in English.
In its earliest stages, the Observer was a vibrant multinational English daily run by an excellent team of British, Australian and Indian editors, reporters and proofreaders, who all laid solid foundations for news publishing.
I missed the first Editor-in-Chief, but I worked with the second one, the late John Burrows and then Ian Cummins. Later, we had our first Omani Editor-in-Chief, Said bin Khalfan al Harthy, who joined as a confident news man, following his career at the Ministry of Information.
I liked my job at the Observer. Being a graduate of English language and literature (Mohammed V University, Morocco)—which included translation studies, I was sure that, after a successful tenure as a teacher in Morocco and Oman, I would find it easy. However, working for an English daily turned out to be a big challenge. It was not enough to master the target language (rendering Arabic stories into English), but the challenge was how to make the translation meaningful as English news, irrespective of source language.
In a newspaper environment, a translator has to maintain speed and accuracy. Though my English texts did not include mistakes of grammar or spelling, I felt that something was missing—judging by the reaction of the paper’s reporters and editors. Although my speed improved over the first few months, there was still a gap in maintaining accuracy.
The magic solution came as a surprise when I started my postgraduate studies in translation. I suddenly paid attention to the theory of translation that I was applying—the Formal Equivalence Theory, rather than the Dynamic Equivalence Theory, the brainchild of the American linguist Eugene Nida (1914-2011).
Nida coined this highly practical style of ‘dynamic’ rendering as a measure to troubleshoot the alienation (crudeness and vagueness) that often engulfed ‘formal’ rendering, notably the need to focus on the ‘message’ or meaning (to align with the target reader), rather than the words of the original text. The text moderation job was being done by the Observer reporters, from whom I learned the style of journalist adaptation. I used to read the published reports based on my translation the next day.
When I started applying the Dynamic Equivalence Theory in translating news for the Observer, the response was great and encouraging. That coincided with the release of ONA’s English news translated from the agency’s Arabic stream in the 1990s. Due to the shortage of staff and, thanks to the follow-up of editors-in-chief and the support of reporters and editors, I was promoted to the post of Local News Editor responsible for editing ONA news, managing local pages and writing synopsis for the front page.
We used to work in challenging conditions. We got international news from teleprinters connected to telephone lines that published news from Reuters, AFP, AP, DPA, etc. If the machines run out of ink or paper or get obstructed by any means, the news lines tick away in the void and you end up losing important events.
We got local news by using cassette recorders to record Arabic news, and later English news, from Oman Radio and TV. Of course, the reporters played a significant role in providing the paper with local news by interviewing English speaking individuals. When they had to get news from non-English speaking officials or executives, they used to bring Arabic printed matter for translation.
In the past, hard copies of newspapers were so precious that they were put in files and archived for years to serve as reference materials that were highly sought after, even by lawyers and litigants in courts. Hard copies were also the daily mediums of communication between advertisers and the public. Space was very valuable in newspapers. It was sold in inches and centimetres.
In today’s digital age, the print media industry faces great challenges. Apart from losing advertising space, newspapers face tough competition from social media networks, which also compete with other official sources of news like news agencies and state radio and television channels. I think that to compete with social media, newspapers have to develop very active websites, applications and user-friendly digital copies accessible at any time. I think that Oman Observer is faring well and it can do better.
I acknowledge the valuable coaching of the early reporters, sub-editors and all veteran and contemporary staff who made my tenure at the Oman Observer an enjoyable one. Of course, it was not all sweet and honey. There were bitter moments with scornful individuals who exposed their own human weaknesses, but I had to put up with that, knowing that any escalation would spoil my future growth. I took pride in sharing the experience of making the paper a reliable medium of information in Oman.
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