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Junior Faculty Training Program Economic Growth, Social Inequality and Environmental Change in Cambodia |
Translation Capacity Building
With Support from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Open Society Institute and Private Donors With its mission to promote research, teaching and public service in the social sciences and humanities, CKS seeks to publish and translate key academic materials into the Khmer language while working to build capacity and strengthen the publishing sector in general. Gains in the publishing and the translation sectors have been made in the past few years, yet there is still a notable lack of academic social science and humanities reference materials and texts in the Khmer language. Academic materials available in foreign languages are limited and beyond the capacity of most Cambodian readers to understand. Existing capacities in the fields of translating and publishing in Cambodia are scattered and fragmented which continues to have negative effects on undergraduate and graduate education. To be remedied, this situation calls for a critical mass of trained and educated academic translators and a cohesive publishing plan for the social sciences and humanities in Cambodia, particularly at the university level. CKS has been actively engaged in the fields of translation and publishing. A notable example is the Khmer language translation of David Chandler's The History of Cambodia published by CKS in 2005. Within six months of its release, the book was in its second printing, and it continues to sell well in Cambodia, which underscores the urgent need of reference materials written or translated into Khmer. To this end, CKS has developed a Translation Capacity Building program to train and mentor a core team of translators, in conjunction with our Building Capacity in Cambodian Higher Education (BIC-HE) program funded by the Rockefeller Foundation. Following each six month session of the BIC-HE program, three participants are selected to be trained as translators, involving a circular feedback and review process, where selections of reading material used in the courses are translated and published. The translators are familiar with the material to be translated, are educated in the social sciences and humanities and already have background knowledge about the material to be translated and are thus able to concentrate on the process of translating itself. The Rockefeller Foundation, the Open Society Institute and private donors are supporting this three year project in which up to six translators are trained per year. From this pool of CKS-trained translators, three were selected to form the core translation team for the next major CKS translation effort: Milton Osborne's Southeast Asia: An Introductory History. Guided by a Cambodian project supervisor with a background in Southeast Asian Studies and a Khmer-French linguist, this project officially began with a five-day workshop in February 2007. Conducted in collaboration with the Institute of Foreign Languages, a department of the Royal University of Phnom Penh, the aim of this workshop was to provide information on the technicalities and processes of translation and publishing, before beginning the practical component of translation training.
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