Katharine Halls: AI is diluting literary translations

Katharine Halls is an award-winning translator who brings Arabic books to English audiences. Her work on Ahmed Naji’s prison memoir Rotten Evidence won the Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in autobiography.

Halls spoke to Al Majalla about Naji’s book, what drew her toward a career as a translator and the forces reshaping work as a literary translator, including artificial intelligence.

She has a degree in Arabic and Hebrew from Oxford University, an MA in translation and interpreting from the University of Manchester, and an MA in Middle East Studies from the American University in Cairo.

This is the conversation.

Can you tell us about your experience translating Rotten Evidence by Ahmed Naji and what drew you to this particular project?

Rotten Evidence is a witty and observant account of prison life and a beautiful testimony to the power of literature. And Naji’s excoriation of the poor taste and incoherence of dictatorship is brilliant and funny, too.

When I read it in 2020, I knew instantly that it was an important book and one I wanted the world to read. I knew I was going to enjoy translating it, too—and I was completely right about that!

You've received several prestigious awards, including the Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize, the PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant and the Sheikh Hamad Award for Translation. How have these accolades influenced your career?

I put great care into my work, and it’s wonderfully gratifying to see the results recognised by my colleagues. Prizes and grants are also important in providing material support to literary translators who are chronically underpaid, and I’m very grateful for that support.

Can you share your journey of becoming a translator and what sparked your interest in Arabic-to-English translation?

During my studies in Arabic and Hebrew, I have always loved translation. I began translating properly during the revolution of 2011 when activist friends asked me to help, which quickly led to real translation work. Only later did I begin translating literature, though I have always been an avid reader.

You have translated a variety of works, including literature, non-fiction, film, and theatre. Which genre do you find the most challenging, and why?

I’ve been lucky to translate so many different things, all of which have their own challenges. I love literature because it’s such an absorbing process to step into an author’s world and recreate it in English.

With film and theatre, I enjoy trying to get the dialogue right and working with the various technical constraints involved in creating subtitles. Then there are works that require you to master a particular field of vocabulary or language style—such as a 1903 novella I just translated. It was so fun translating into the English of the period.

How do you feel the landscape of literary translation is evolving, and what role do these awards play in highlighting the importance of translation work?

Over the last decade or so, I’ve seen translators earning more recognition as literary creators in their own right, which is a positive development. However, just this year, I came across a website billing itself as a multilingual literary journal which uses AI to translate the work it publishes. AI is widely used in other kinds of translation, but this is the first time I’ve seen AI encroaching upon literary translation, and I’m very worried—not just for the sake of translators’.

Making art is the most human of endeavours, and our lives will be greatly impoverished if we allow tech bros to take it away from us and give it to their pet robots.

There is a scarcity of translations of Arabic literature into foreign languages. As a translator, what kind of Arabic works garner interest from Western publishers?

Specific topics or author profiles get Western publishers excited; it’s true. As a translator and agent, I have to be aware of what Western publishers are interested in, but I try not to allow it to dominate my thinking when I’m deciding what books to work on.

I want to introduce anglophone readers to exciting, unfamiliar corners of the literary world, not hand over what publishers think they want. Of course, that’s not always possible, and I sometimes find myself feeling frustrated when Western publishers pass over excellent Arabic books.

But I don’t want to have the weight of the world on my shoulders all the time, so I try to rely on my own taste and trust that I’ll be able to connect with publishers and, ultimately, readers who appreciate that taste.