Every culture and every society has its stories. The Grimm brothers, Charles Perrault, Božena Němcová and others have collected and written down the fairy tales and stories of their countries. These often somehow have some things in common and also differ in interesting nuances.
This also applies to Tunisia but with the exception that these stories were usually not written down because Tunisian Arabic is not actually a written language. The author, or rather the collector of these stories, Abdel Aziz Al-Oroui, therefore told these stories on the radio. Later, his recordings were placed on Youtube:
Stories 1 to 19: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dc5wRe-8Z_Y
Story 20: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7jmWx624mRw
These Tunisian stories were published some decades ago as a book and were even translated. We did not search for this work. We wanted to stick to the oral version at first and therefore transcribed the YouTube recordings into Tunisian. Afterwards, our staff transmitted the stories into Arabic (MSA), English, French and German. We deliberately speak here of a transmission rather than a translation, since there are different ways of telling stories in all languages. It was more important for us to tell a good story than to translate “accurately.” Word for word accuracy is neither good nor meaningful in a literary context.
The idea of the project is to make this corner of Tunisian culture accessible not only to Tunisians but also to interested folks from other cultures and languages. Since the ilès team only works in Arabic, English and occasionally French and German, we only paid attention to these languages.
Regarding copyrights, we assume that there is no copyright on these historical texts. We also feel that our transmissions of these stories into Arabic, English, French and German should be freely used and distributed. We only ask that in the case of the recordings, you do not use or pass them on without our permission.
The publication of the stories will take place gradually on our website. In addition, an application for Android will be created and updated accordingly.
Remarks and comments are welcome.
by Arne