It requires knowledge of the cultures of both the original and target language and at times, it involves the rendering of words as much as their conceptual content. And while translation "thought-for-thought" rather than "word-for-word" is the guiding thread for most serious translators, none could do the job without a good dictionary on their desk.But as essential a tool it might be, a dictionary has its inevitable omissions, notably as far as the translation of ideas from one language to the other goes. Ergun Kocabıyık, a professional writer, editor and translator, was faced with that problem the day he proceeded to translate to Turkish the "Mystical Dimensions of Islam" by famous historian of religion Annemarie Schimmel.
"I needed a dictionary of Islamic mysticism during the translation process," Kocabıyık recalls. "But there wasn't any bilingual English-Turkish dictionary for technical terms of Sufism." Kocabıyık, who has edited a long list of translated books about Sufism over the past 10 years, describes dictionaries as his professions' "most important tools."
Realizing that there was no such dictionary that reflected the mystical tradition of Islam and the abundant literature it had yielded, Kocabıyık decided to create one. The first bilingual English-Turkish "tasavvuf sözlüğü" (mysticism dictionary) took six years to complete, from May 2001 to May 2007. It is now available in major bookstores.
Kocabıyık says he found inspiration in the Turkish translations of some classical Sufi works, citing as examples al-Kalâbâdhî's "The Doctrine of the Sufis" and Al-Hujwírí's "Kashf Al-Mahjúb" (The Revelation of the Mystery). What these books had in common was their availability in both Turkish and English translations. Kocabıyık compared them and listed technical terms that might appear in a dictionary. As the project progressed, the author added new books to his list and searched those books' indices.
A collection rather than a dictionary
"I have to say, I don't translate words," Kocabıyık notes. "This dictionary is a collection. I selected words from translations or original books and listed them -- sometimes with example sentences -- in my dictionary." Kocabıyık confesses that he is unable to tell us how many words the 213-page book gathers. "I suggested a few words. … Most technical Sufism terms are Arabic or Persian in Turkish anyway."
Even though the dictionary comprises both Turkish-English and English-Turkish parts, the latter is much more dense and detailed (124 pages) than the former (70 pages). The reason for this is that each entry in the English-Turkish section is followed by a list of alternative translations to Turkish, synonyms in English and references from related literature. The Turkish-English section only provides a number of English equivalents for every Turkish word. "I didn't want to repeat the same example sentences [in both the English-Turkish and Turkish-English sections]. The first aim of this dictionary is to help Turkish translators," Kocabıyık explained.
The dictionary, which is not a collective work per se but benefited from Kocabıyık's numerous readings, was published in January 2008 by the Anahtar Kitaplar publishing house, after hundreds of hours' research. "To be patient was a very difficult thing," Kocabıyık explains. "But the most difficult part of my work was to prepare a list of cross references and synonyms at the end of each entry."
The author also gives a few instances where translation of technical terms was anything but a breeze. "We see that different translators use different wordings for the same entry," Kocabıyık says. "For example, you can see eight different English wordings for the Turkish 'tecelli': theophany, epiphany, irradiation, manifestation, revelation, revelation of the glory of God, self-disclosure and self-manifestation." Kocabıyık also cites five different versions of the Turkish "şatahat," depending on the author's preference: ecstatic expressions, ecstatic phrases, ecstatic utterances, theophatic locutions and unruly utterances.
Those lists of alternatives suggest, as Kocabıyık puts it, that "the terminology of Sufism is not completely established in English." Therefore, he adds, "the correct way to prepare such a dictionary was not to translate, but to collect different translations for every entry. A user can select one of them according to his or her point of view. I didn't make a decision in the name of the user."
However, Kocabıyık did make a point to provide users with a list of rare wordings for each entry. Hence, the English "pilgrim" is not translated by the Turkish "hacı" but by the less common "sâlik," because "Sirdar Ikbal Ali Shah used 'sâlik' for pilgrim in his 'Islamic Sufism' in 1933." Kocabıyık, who views his efforts as an "additional work," says he did not want to propose "ordinary explanations." His dictionary includes "rare and specific entries and must be used with other dictionaries." Similarly, Kocabıyık chose to translate "heaven" as "bihişt" rather than the more popular "cennet": "Everyone knows heaven is 'cennet'," he explains. "If a translator is searching for a word other than 'cennet', my dictionary will give a different and rare word to him. 'Bihişt' was used in lots of mystic poetry. A Turkish translator recalls 'cennet' easily, but not 'bihişt'."
Kocabıyık hopes his book will turn out to be useful for translators, copy editors, proofreaders, researchers and expert readers of mystical literature. "Translations [of books devoted to Sufism] are published every year in Turkey," he says. "But nobody tried to write such a dictionary before. I hope my work will be a good starting point." But as Kocabıyık also points out: "A dictionary never finishes. If I can find time and energy, I want to develop it."
İngilizce-Türkçe/Türkçe-İngilizce Tasavvuf Sözlüğü, by Ergun Kocabıyık, Anahtar Kitaplar Publishing, January 2008. Approximately YTL 20
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