Retrouver la résilience en arabe dans le rapport annuel 2019 de la Banque mondiale « Ending poverty, Investing in opportunity »

Abstract

Since the 2000s, the development programs of international organizations, and in particular the World Bank, have been encouraging rulers and ruled to adopt a “resilient” attitude in the face of disasters - natural, economic, industrial... A concept borrowed from physics and then psychology, mostly translated into Arabic in the annual reports of the financial institution by the predicative noun صمود (ṣumūd). However, we observe that in the Arabic version of the 2019 report, other translational choices have been proposed, as if to fill a semantic void. Indeed, certain aspects of resilience, such as adaptation and restoration efforts, are absent from the صمود (ṣumūd) Sememe. On the other hand, the connotative charge of this word in the context of the modern history of the Arab world in general, and Palestine in particular, gives rise to connections on the ideological level that weaken its capacities to refer to resilience. We will show in this article that the two concepts, resilience and صمود (ṣumūd) are partially convergent central notions of two distinct fields - international development and Arab management of the Palestinian question - that have been integrated into distinct founding discourses, bearers of shared values of different orders. In this context, the “narrative” of resilience according to the World Bank reported in the multilingual 2019 report could become ambiguous in the Arabic version, so much so does the word صمود (ṣumūd) circulate in discourses committed to an issue that engages, politically, Arab institutions.