‘Sacrifice by Fire’: The first translation of ‘Holocaust’ into Cambodia’s Khmer language
Posted: Mon Sep 02, 2019 8:29 pm
A woman holds a copy of Sovicheth Meta’s Khmer translation of Hédi Fried’s book “Questions I Am Asked About the Holocaust” in Phnom Penh on July 19, 2019. Photo by Matt Surrusco.
2 September 2019
Jean-Michel Filippi, a professor of Khmer linguistics at the Royal University of Phnom Penh, said that to his knowledge, apart from the Khmer word for “genocide,” Meta’s phrase was the first and only Khmer translation of “Holocaust,”
A Cambodian translator has coined a new Khmer term for the word “Holocaust” for use in new Documentation Center of Cambodia (DC-Cam) publications, including her Khmer-language translation of a memoir by a Holocaust survivor that was released in Phnom Penh on 19 July 2019.
While there have been other Khmer translations of books about the Holocaust, including DC-Cam’s Khmer version of “The Diary of a Young Girl” by Anne Frank, “right now, there is no word for Holocaust in the Khmer dictionary,” Meta told VOD.
Sovicheth Meta is a 21-year-old translator and researcher at DC-Cam which catalogues historical materials from the genocidal Khmer Rouge period from 1975 to 1979. She said she translated “Holocaust,” which refers to the mass murder and genocide of more than 6 million Jews by the German Nazi regime in the 1940s, as the Khmer “bochea phleung,” which means to “sacrifice by fire.”
The translator said she hopes every Cambodian, especially youth, will be able to read the book and learn about Europe and Cambodia’s similar histories with an aim toward preventing future genocides:
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