A major concern among many Arab scientists and governments today, in their endeavors to catch up with the industrialized nations, relates to the issue of the language of scientific communication and research. Some Arab countries have arabized some fields of science, others still use English or French, the languages of the former colonizers, as the major media of scientific education and research. These differing educational policies result from the ongoing debate on whether to achieve scientific and technological progress by learning these foreign languages or by resorting to translation. There seems to be some agreement that while learning these foreign languages will undeniably enhance the individual scientist’s capacity to develop his/her potential and to become part of a highly interactive and globalizing scientific community, it cannot contribute much to developing the scientific communication capability of the Arabic language.

A look at the history of science will quickly reveal that scientific knowledge has progressed largely by means of translation. During the Abbasid dynasty, for instance, much time and effort were vested in traslation; a House of Wisdom was established in the ninth century to sponsor translations from Greek into Arabic. By the end of the Middle Ages, European nations had translated back much of the scientific achievements of the Islamic civilization as a first step towards the Renaissance. Thus, for instance, the replacement of Roman numerals with the decimal positional number system and the invention of algebra allowed more advanced mathematics. Translation was the main tool which made this kind of cross-cultural scientific fertilization possible and allowed the borrowing languages to develop their own means of scientific communication. 

It is in this spirit that the JCSEA was launched a few months ago to serve as an Arabic-speaking forum for scientific communication in the field of Computer Science. (Information on the editorial policy as well as the first issue of this journal may be found at http://www.phillips-publishing.com/jcsea/.  The goal of this special issue on translation is twofold. Our primary objective is to contribute to the development of a scientific infrastructure for Arabic, in terms of scientific discourse conventions, grammatical structures and lexis, by publishing translations of seminal papers in the field of Computer Science originally published in other languages (English, French, German, Russian, etc.). Our secondary aim is to attract Arabic speaking computer scientists’ attention to the related field of machine translation where computer and language skills converge to produce increasingly cutting edge translation software.  The idea is that by translating these papers into Arabic, we create a platform on which Arabic speaking scholars can take these seminal ideas and build on them, in the same way that other researchers have done in the paper’s original language.

This call for papers is, therefore, intended for both Computer Science specialists and translators and linguists who share similar concerns about enhancing the Arabic language scientific communication potential and/or developing its automatic translation compatibility. Interested CS scholars and computational linguists who have identified a specific computer science and/or machine translation paper are invited to contact the guest editor with a pre-proposal, specifying the journal title, the original language of publication, title, abstract, and keywords of the selected paper. Interested translators are invited to send the guest editor a summary of their translation experience, specifying the source language(s) to translate from. They will then be assigned a paper for translation into Arabic together with the contact details of the CS scholar or the computational linguist who proposed the paper in question. Translators will be encouraged to consult with their computer science or linguist partners to negotiate possible content/form issues.
Native Arabic speaking CS specialists or computational linguists who wish to offer their own translation of the selected paper are of course encouraged to do so. The proposed translations of selected papers will then be reviewed by a team of Arabic speaking CS specialists, linguists, and translators.


Schedule:

30th October 2007: deadline for submitting proposals
30th November 2007: notification of acceptance.
30th December 2007: deadline for submission of translations
31st January 2008: referee feedback forwarded to translators
28 February 2008: submission of final versions of translations to guest editor
April 2008: publication date.