Roula Salam

Roula is an Arabic-English Certified Translator and associate interpreter in Arabic. She holds a doctoral degree in English Literature and a certificate in education and has more than 20 years of experience in the industry. Roula is the president of the Association of Translators and Interpreters of Alberta, and also part of the Canadian General Standards Board for Translation Services. Her experience is the cornerstone of WWB’s training, editing and cultural brokerage components of our company. Working for our offices of Edmonton and Calgary, Roula’s goal is for WWB to become a leading North American and world-wide company in language and communication services. 

Roula Salam is an Arabic-English Certified Translator, and president of the Association of Translators and Interpreters of Alberta. Roula holds a PhD degree in English Literature from Queen’s University, a certificate in education, and has more than twenty years of experience in teaching, research, and writing, and over 15 years’ experience in translation.

Roula left her native Lebanon for Canada in 2005 as a doctoral student and single mother. Her experience in translation had commenced in Lebanon, where she embarked on that path of her career by translating children’s books and commercial documents. Between 1994 and 2005 in Lebanon, she worked in the fields of journalism, editing, and teaching, alongside translation, while she pursued her undergraduate and graduate degrees. 

In Canada, her doctoral specialization focused on postcolonial studies, and her dissertation, entitled “Hope in the Most Unlikely Spaces: Thawra and the Contemporary Arabic Novel” (September 2011), focused on manifestations of rebellion (or thawra in Arabic) and socio-political transformation as expressed in various literary works from the postcolonial Arab-African world. This was written at a critical time when the Arab Spring was just beginning to take the world by storm.  As such, Roula conducted extensive valuable research and comparative studies between English translations of Arabic literary texts as part of her doctoral research.

Her doctoral research re-ignited her passion for translation and interpretation here in Canada. In 2006-2007, Roula worked as a Court Interpreter in Kingston, Ontario, before moving to Edmonton in 2007. In Edmonton, she first worked as a translator for a year and a half at the Department of Anthropology, University of Alberta, and then worked as an interpreter for the Faculty of Nursing between 2013-2015. She became a member with ATIA in 2013, and gradually began establishing her business and reputation as a translator. To date, she has translated a great number of literary, academic, educational personal, and official documents for individual clients, companies, and educational and government institutions.

Her career in translation also extends to training and professional development. Roula has both taught a number of workshops in translation across Edmonton and Calgary. She has been working for several years with Edmonton and Calgary Police to help in police interpreting training. She has offered the “Advanced Literary Translation Workshop” to the Alberta Writers’ Guild in Edmonton, and has also offered the workshop “But It Still Reads Like a Translation!” in Edmonton and Calgary. She has also published poetry translations in the literary translation journal, TransLit. 

 Roula teaches English at the University of Alberta, has been a member of the Canadian Armed Forces, and resides in Edmonton, Alberta with her husband and two girls.