On the weekend of March 7-9, I went to quite a few sessions at the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature. Today, I’m going to write about what I heard (and learned) at a session called “The English Language: Hero or Villain?”.

For many decades and for many people, the English language has been considered the passport to education, diplomacy, business success, political aspiration and cultural cool. But beneath the obvious advantages of this alleged lingua franca, is English actually the villain of the piece? Does it disadvantage and inhibit the bloom and strength of other languages?

Chairing the discussion is Arabist and interpreter Leslie McLoughlin who is joined by historian and author of The Arabs: A History, Eugene Rogan, and Abdulla Al-Dabbagh, professor of English Literature at UAE University and author of Literary Intellectuals: East and West.

This was probably the session that I was most looking forward to on LitFest weekend. Zaid was supposed to meet me after work to attend, but unfortunately didn’t manage to make it, so I was there alone. It was my first experience with the three men who made up the panel, though I heard them all speak at least once more during the weekend. I have to be honest: the introduction was quite long and a bit rambly.

The panel started out with the question: is English responsible for the problems with national language in the UAE? (For those of you who might not know, there is an ongoing debate in the UAE – and, indeed, in many other countries including in the Arab world – about the loss of traditional languages as this generation learns English instead.)

Al-Dabbagh responded by asking, instead, what it means to be a world or universal language. He pointed out that we have had this problem before: in the Renaissance, Latin was the common language and was threatened by modern languages. He commented that we are now in a similar situation with regards to languages in the world, and wondered what English would eventually be replaced by.

Rogan said that English is threatening the languages of just about every country in the world, not just the UAE. He said that English is growing by about 8500 words a day, and McLoughlin added that the way language changes is very fluid, and that you cannot pin down vocabulary. Rogan gave the examples of Irish and Welsh as essentially dead languages that are struggling against English. Most importantly, he said that the “English problem” is part of a much bigger issue in the UAE, as many students aren’t really fluent in Arabic or English.

Al-Dabbagh raised the question of the supremacy of English. In the 1970s, the key words in higher education in the Middle East were “Arabic” and “Arabization”. Schools tried to teach all subjects in Arabic. In the last 10-15 years, there has been a radical shift to teach everything in English as it was thought to be the best preparation for students. Now, the focus is on both languages. He said that, as long as there is not one clear common language, people will really need to learn more than one language; in the meantime, mono-lingual speakers (including those of English) will be at a disadvantage.

Rogan went on to an important point, which is that students all over the world are unmotivated to learn other languages. He spoke about the “impoverishment of intellectual enterprise when we don’t expect people to speak more languages than just English”, giving examples of history students who can’t read basic primary texts because they’re in German, French, or other languages that university students used to be expected to understand. He also pointed out that the best window through which to appreciated another culture is through their language. The most important point, in my opinion, was when he said that “the more the English-speaking world becomes dominant, the more vulnerable it will be because it doesn’t have a clue how the rest of the world sees it”.

What do you think? Was there anything in this talk you’d like to discuss?

I really agree that there should be efforts to maintain traditional languages even when students are being taught English. I wish that I spoke more than one language fluently. I didn’t feel the problem as much when I was living in Canada, but now that I live elsewhere, and have travelled to quite a few other countries, I definitely feel like I miss out on a lot because I’m not able to speak anything except English.

On the weekend of March 7-9, I went to quite a few sessions at the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature. Today, I’m going to write about what I heard (and learned) at a session called “Page to Screen to Page”:

Readers are often passionate about how their literary heroes are translated from page to screen, so is it a daunting task for a screen-writer to attempt the adaptation? How to decide what to cut and whose is the vision behind the screen version? After a blockbuster movie, whose is the task of producing a novelisation and how successful are these as works of fiction? Join our illustrious panel to discuss the excitement and fear behind adapting from page to screen to page.

This panel was made up of Deborah Moggah, Ian Ranking, Lynda La Plante, and Alan Dean Foster. I have far fewer notes from this panel than from last week’s (I bet you’re happy about that), but it wasn’t because the panel wasn’t interesting. Rather, I took less notes because the discussion was more personal – each person talked about their personal experiences and their work, and I felt more like it was a conversation than a straight “panel”. So I’ve got some things that I noted down, but otherwise, I just really enjoyed hearing more about these people’s experiences with writing, television/film, and adapting works.

Something interesting right from up front was that Rankin said that he hasn’t watched any of the films based on his Rebus novels. He said that this is because he doesn’t want the actors and voices to replace what’s in his head. La Plante pointed out that she likes producing because “if you produce it, you can control it”, and Rankin admitted that he has a huge ego and so would be a control freak about the films if he got involved. He said that film is a very different way of telling a story and that he wants to stick to writing novels.

La Plante said that she started off screenwriting in order to write herself a leading role, and that she didn’t realize until she was finished that she’d written herself out. She said that the primary difference between novels and television dramas is the budget. She also said that you need to learn how to pace a television show, to move it, and that a lot of strategy needs to go into making a television script (though this is less true of film scripts).

Moggeh said that, when novel writing, your relationship with your characters is completely private, that you have complete control over a secret world. In contrast, she said that when screenwriting, you work with people and have to be adaptable, that even though they’d be nowhere without you, you are their servant as they’re putting up the money. She said that when adapting a book, after the first draft, you never look at the original text again. Moggeh also said that in film and television adaptations, the actors have to give you the interior world that you have in the novel through their expressions, something which is difficult to do but that a good actor can pull off.

When asked what advice he would give an author whose work will be adapted to the screen, Foster said: “take large amounts of drugs and stay comatose until the project comes out”.

La Plante said that the gift of writing a series is that you get to grow with the characters. On the downside, though, she said that in a short series you lose the “breathing room” for the characters.

Foster said that he regards adaptation from film to book as a collaboration between himself and the screenwriters even though they have no direct part in it. He said that he gets to show what the characters thoughts were unlike in the film. He is also “very aware of the fact that [he's] working with someone else’s work and they have no control over it”, and so tries to be respectful. He said that he tries to go back to the original work as much as possible. Finally, he said that the studios have become more involved in the books than they used to be, so now they want him to change the book to match the final cut of the movie when possible. Even though it’s not in his contract to make these changes, he says that he does it anyways because he feels like it’s his own director’s cut of the movies, and that “from a fannish standpoint it’s fun”. I found it rather interesting that he maintains a fan’s point of view while writing books that go along with movies.

I feel like this talk just brushed the surface of the issues when adapting books or screenplays between genres, but it was an interesting primer. Do you have any thoughts about adaptation that you’d like to share?