Rana holds a BA in English Language and Literature from the Faculty of Al-Alsun, Ain-Shams University, Egypt. She earned her MA with distinction in the Cultural Politics of Translation from Cairo University. She also obtained a Postgraduate Diploma in UN and Legal Translation from the American University in Cairo (AUC). During her professional career, she had 7 years’ hands-on experience in the translation, copy-editing and media monitoring industry. Rana specializes in economic translation, having worked as a Senior Translator/Editor at Naeem Holding for Investments for almost five and a half years. She had her first academic publication in Alif-38: Translation and the Production of Knowledge(s), guest-edited by Professor Mona Baker. She developed a specific interest in legal translation that started with her college graduation project, which focused on the fundamentals of legal drafting. Her MA thesis further addressed the development of legal translation during the Egyptian Renaissance/Nahda (from 19th to mid-20th century) from a socio-linguistic perspective, offering a comparative study of two Egyptian Civil Codes of 1883 and 1948, while highlighting the contribution of the jurist ‘Abd al-Razzaq al-Sanhuri in deploying the translation policy of co-drafting in the latter code. Rana is taking part in a research project on “Words Laying Down the Law: Translating Arabic Legal Discourse,” which is being conducted by Aga Khan University in London, contributing with corpus-driven research that focuses on the translation of the UN’s International Commercial Terms (INCOTERMS).
Rana is currently doing a PhD on the translation of Islamic, or Shari’a law into English. She is developing a corpus-based study to explore how concepts/terms drawn from Islamic Shari’a law are rendered across both performative (e.g. codes and contracts) and non-performative (e.g. commentary) legal texts, and how they interact with postcolonial ideological agendas that aim to preserve intangible cultural heritage and promote the representation of minority groups on the global map. Rana hopes to build up a database on matters that are inspired by Islamic Shari’a such as Islamic law and Islamic finance, particularly amid the contemporary growing application of Shari’a in Europe due to the increasing flow of Muslim migrants and refugees, and the ongoing endeavours by several European countries, including Ireland, to ensure Shari’a-compliant tax and financial codes, as they seek to become hubs for Islamic finance.