Into Arabic: UNCRPD’S Rights Discourse and the Politics of Interpretation

This paper deals with the discourse shift in the inclusion politics as manifested in the articulation of the United Nations Convention of Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNCRPD 2006) and its cultural transposition and translation through languages and across the North/South divide. The paper particularly tackles the question of globalization of culture and internationalization of discourse and their implication for the politics of interpretation and translation of the rights discourse of Persons With Disabilities (PWD), its ramification with respect to both the shift from the politics of recognition to acknowledgement and the framing of persons with disabilities—as subjects with rights against the long entrenched objectifying framework of charity. The paper reads the UNCRPD (2006) and its Arabic translation to examine the politics of naming, its effect on the framing of person with disabilities (as object of charity versus subjects with rights) and its ramification with respect to the developing social policies/practices of inclusion. The paper seeks to conceptually engage with the Recognition/Acknowledgement paradigm to investigate the type of inclusion represented in the Source Text and its transposition in the Target Text. To this end, the paper opens a repertoire between Political Philosophy, Critical Discourse Analysis and Translation Studies to structure its framework from the theoretical literature on the politics of recognition. The paper utilizes Fairclough’s three-dimensional models (2013) as a tool of analysis to examine the discursive event embedded in the production and dissemination of UNCRP, its implication with respect to both the politics of interpretation in the Source and Target Texts and the discursive and socio-cultural practices across the civilizational divide.