8th edition of SHATIU; award ceremony of honouring winners to be held on January 29

The Steering Committee of the Award has completed the preliminary screening process for nominations, which were submitted for the award in its eighth season for the year 2022. The Board of Trustees of the Sheikh Hamad Award for Translation and International Understanding had announced the same. The award ceremony of honouring the winners of the 8th edition will be held on January 29, on the side lines of the Forum Arab and International Relations, slated for January 28 and 29, 2023.

The spokesperson for the Sheikh Hamad Award for Translation and International Understanding, Dr. Hanan Al Fayyad, said that the Award Steering Committee received, this year, a number of nominations of individuals and translation institutions from Qatar, Spain, Jordan, United Arab Emirates, Algeria, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Somalia, Iraq, Kuwait, Germany, Morocco, United Kingdom, United States, Italy, Turkiye, Tunisia, Niger, South Africa, Sultanate of Oman, Syria, Palestine, France, Canada, Lebanon, Libya, the Netherlands, Egypt, New Zealand, Romania, Indonesia, Tanzania and Kazakhstan. Dr. Al Fayyad explained that the highest nominations came from Turkiye, followed by Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Morocco, Iraq and Jordan, pointing out that the nominated works featured various fields of human sciences, including Islamic studies, literature, philosophy, social sciences, political sciences and history.

Al Fayyad added that the award ceremony of the Sheikh Hamad Award for Translation and International Understanding will be held on January 29, on the sidelines of the Forum Arab and International Relations, slated for January 28 and 29, 2023. With total prizes of $2m, the 8th edition of the award has adopted the Turkish language as a main language, after English. 

The Award Categories include: Translation from Arabic into English; Translation from English into Arabic; Translation from Arabic into Turkish; Translation from Turkish into Arabic; and the Achievement Award in English and Turkish, the two main languages in addition to the categories of Achievement Awards in translations of selected languages from and into Arabic, namely: Romanian, Kazakh, Swahili, Bahasa Indonesia, and Vietnamese as sub-languages.

Regarding the choice of the Turkish language as a second language, Al Fayyad indicated that the nomination of the Turkish language took place for the second time, as it had already entered the nominations as a second main language in 2015, and that is because of the large number of materials translated and issued from Arabic to Turkish and vice-versa.

Al Fayyad also underlined that the nominations are promising that the process of human knowledge remains present and interest in this committee increases, and that the translation movement remains a live field and an uninterrupted bridge between peoples’ civilisations.

Sheikh Hamad Award for Translation and International Understanding was founded in Doha, Qatar in 2015. It is an international prize run by a board of trustees, a steering committee and independent panels of judges.

The Award seeks to honour translators and acknowledge their role in strengthening the bonds of friendship and cooperation amongst peoples and nations of the world. It hopes to reward merit and excellence, encourage creativity, uphold the highest moral and ethical standards, and spread the values of diversity, pluralism and openness. 

The Award also aspires to inculcate a culture of knowledge and dialogue, promote Arab and Islamic culture, develop international understanding, and encourage mature cross-cultural interaction between Arabic and other world languages through the medium of translation.