Deputy Foreign Minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Abdullah congratulates a winner at the awards ceremony for the King Abdullah International Award for Translation in Geneva on Thursday. (SPA)

The winners of the annual King Abdullah International Award for Translation (KAIAT) have praised Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Abdullah for helping to unite people across religious and cultural divides.

These comments were made on the sidelines of the awards ceremony in Geneva on Thursday night. Those in attendance included Deputy Foreign Minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Abdullah, the KAIAT board chairman. The winners also wished the king a speedy recovery from his illness and said that such projects would help bring people together, particularly those in the West with Arabs and Muslims.

In the category of translating work from other languages into Arabic, the prize went to Mustafa Qassim for Tragic Policies of the Superpowers, who said that the king’s award is on a par with the Nobel Prize and would encourage dialogue between opposing groups and boost interest in knowledge.

“Winning this award would definitely support efforts to spread Islamic philosophy widely among English speakers and introduce to them the richness of this great heritage,” said winner Peter Poorman, director of the John Rylands Institute for Research, United Kingdom, who is also professor of Greek and Arabic Studies at the University of Manchester.

Poorman and his co-winner Peter Adamson, who took 10 years to translate the Philosophical Epistles of Al-Kindi into English, said the awards would help to create greater openness among cultures.

The National Center for Translation in Egypt and the Tunisian Academy for Sciences and Literature shared the prize for institutions doing outstanding work in translating books into Arabic.

The prize for translating work in natural sciences from other languages into Arabic went to Marwan Al-Wazra, and Hassan Layiqah for their English to Arabic translation of Medicine in Calamities — Comprehensive Principles and Practices, and Saleem Masudi, Samia Shaalal and Abdul Salam Al-Yaghfouri who translated Daly’s Analysis from French into Arabic.

In the category of translating Arabic books into other languages, the prize went to Saleh Al-Anazi for his translation of History of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia into French. The prize for individual efforts went to Swiss professor Hana Yanka, who served as the honorary president of the International Permanent Conference of University Institutes of Translators, for her efforts to promote studies on translation.

This prize was shared by Chevi Li of Shanghai University for his efforts to introduce Islamic and Arab culture into China with translations including the Holy Qur’an, Sahih Al-Bukhari and Simplified Arabic-Chinese Dictionary.

King Abdullah created the prize in October 2006 to promote cultural and intellectual exchange. The cash awards amount to SR750,000 for each category and SR500,000 for individual efforts.

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