Since its inception in 2020, Arabic LearnCUID has grown into one of the most vibrant and culturally rich branches of the broader LearnCUID initiative. What began as a vision to explore Arabic traditions through collaborative research has evolved into a transnational learning network with more than 1,700 participants across 20+ European countries. In 2024 alone, our learning groups worked with an unprecedented volume of Arabic cultural material, translating, interpreting, and engaging with texts that span centuries, disciplines, and geographies.
But with this growth has come a sobering reality: the sustainability of Arabic LearnCUID is now at risk due to funding shortages.
One of the most defining aspects of Arabic LearnCUID is its translation-driven learning model. Unlike traditional programs that rely on pre-existing textbooks, our groups work with rare manuscripts, private archives, and untranslatable cultural materials. This means nearly every text must be translated or adapted specifically for each group.
In 2024, Arabic LearnCUID learning groups translated close to 1.2 million words of Arabic literature, poetry, folklore, and historical texts into multiple European languages, including Czech, Greek, Polish, Romanian, French, German, English, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Hungarian, Bulgarian, Portuguese, and Slovak. This reflects not only our reach, but our responsibility to sustain a multilingual, inclusive, and culturally respectful learning environment for all. These were not just texts, but living learning materials, sourced from private archives and cultural repositories across Europe.
To support this volume, the estimated cost for translation work in 2024 reached nearly €150,000. This figure includes professional translation, editing, cultural annotation, and multilingual formatting needed to make materials usable in a digital learning setting. A portion of these translations was supported through community and in-kind efforts, but the financial burden has grown well beyond what unpaid contributions can sustain. In 2024, this growing cost was met through ad hoc donations and personal funding, a model that cannot continue.
Due to these financial constraints, long projects, the most research-intensive, interdisciplinary, and impactful efforts, have been indefinitely postponed as of December 2024. Many of these projects are near completion and require only final editorial or translation work to be made finalized. Still, without immediate funding, their outcomes will remain inaccessible.
Shorter projects, typically 3 to 6 months in duration, are also now facing severe continuity issues. Translation bottlenecks, mentorship gaps, and the cost of accessing private library materials are beginning to impact even our most agile learning formats.
Arabic LearnCUID is not just an education program, it is a cultural bridge built from cooperation, care, and curiosity. It offers learners, many of whom are encountering Arabic literature for the first time, a rare opportunity to work with living traditions and hidden archives. But this work cannot continue on goodwill alone.
We are now actively seeking sustainable funding partnerships to:
Arabic LearnCUID has proven its value, not only as a learning model but as a human-centered infrastructure for intercultural understanding. What we need now is the financial support to carry this work forward without compromising its depth, rigor, and inclusivity.
If you or your institution would like to support this vision, please contact us directly. Every contribution, financial, material, or strategic, brings us one step closer to ensuring that Arabic culture continues to be learned with care, with accuracy, and with others.
Kind regards,
— Nikolaos Toumaras, Creator of LearnCUID & Arabic LearnCUID
March 2025
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