How To Handle Arabic to English Translation

It is pretty challenging to translate text from one language to another in a such a manner that the translated text retains the same meaning, style, and tone. Sometimes, you can keep the meaning with some changes in the tone; however, more often than not it is not that simple. This is exactly the case with Arabic to English Translation.

Language is not just about words; it is not just a couple of letters strung together to make sense. Language is about the emotion that the words invoke in the reader; it is about the tone; about the interpretation. That’s why translation is not easy, because you are not just translating the words according to the dictionary. The translation is correct only when the translated text can invoke the same emotions as the original.

Literature is the best example. When working on translating a book for example, professional Arabic translators will think first of convening the meaning and emotions of the original text, and they will somewhat disregard the wording that the original text used.

Challenges in Arabic to English Translation

Arabic is one of the most commonly spoken languages in the world, with approximately 300 million native speakers spread across the globe. Arabic is the fifth most widely spoken language in the world, just behind English, French, and Mandarin. Almost 22 countries in North Africa and the Middle East use Arabic as their primary language.

Despite its popularity, Arabic, like Mandarin, comes with it's own set of challenges and difficulties, which makes it one of the most difficult languages to translate. Arabic is a Semitic language so it is largely different from English and other languages of the West. This is why a highly skilled translator is required to effectively translate Arabic to English.

Here are some of the challenges that Arabic to English translation faces:

Dialects

A unique aspect of Arabic that the western world doesn't have is that each country that speaks Arabic has developed its own dialect over many centuries, derived from the classical Arabic roots. This means that two people from different nations speaking Arabic might have great difficulty in understanding each other, for example the Moroccan dialect and the Saudi dialect are completely different from each other. This makes translation rather difficult. Someone could be fluent in Arabic, but it is highly likely that they would only be fluent in one or two dialect at most.

This phenomenon in linguistics is called "diglossia". Diglossia is a term that is used when a language has a high and low varieties, a formal and a colloquial version. This term is used a lot when it comes to discussing the relationship between Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and its multiple dialects.

You can think of Arabic as language that exists in a spectrum. On one end you have Modern Standard Arabic, and on the other hand you have the colloquial form of lesser educated people. Most Arabic dialects exist somewhere in the middle of this spectrum.

This perplexes a lot of English speakers with question like "can an Arabic translator only translate a specific dialect?"

To answer this question, all Professional Arabic translators know how to translate MSA into English, but when it comes to a regional dialect, you should definitely hire a native speaker of a that dialect who also happens to be a reliable professional translator.

Culture

The main focus of translation is to ensure that everyone can experience different cultures and famous literary works. For Arabic, this is a pretty difficult.

Sometimes one English word can not completely replace an Arabic one. The linguist is required to use one or more entire sentences in English to accurately explain a single Arabic word.

Arabic is considered to be a very poetic language. If you attempt to use google translate or any tool like that to translate an long Arabic text into English, then you will only end up with an text that sound like it came out straight out of Shakespearian play.

For example, ‘Hor Al-Ayn’ is not a word, rather an Islamic concept in which ‘Hor’ means ‘intense whiteness and deep blackness of the eyes’ and ‘Al-Ayn’ means ‘eyes’. The whole term refers to a beautiful woman who will be a reward for doing good deeds in life. This is an excellent example of how one Arabic word requires one whole sentence in English to accurately convey its meaning.

Grammar

When a text is translated, it should come across as natural. The problem is that the sentence structure and grammar of the Arabic language is completely different from that of English or any other Western language. This means that even though an amateur Arabic translator might translate an English sentence word for word, it still would come of as unnatural to a native English speaker.

For example, in English, you would say ‘many years ago’, but an amateur Arabic translator speaker who does not have experience speaking English would translate it as ‘since many years ago’, according to their own sentence structure.

Usually, Modern English has only nominal sentence structures (i.e. Subject-Verb-Complement). Arabic is syntactically way more flexible than English. In Arabic, there are generally three accepted word orders: VSC, SVC and VCS. But in general, Arabic tends to favor a VSC structure: the ‘verb’ followed by a ‘subject’ which is further followed by an ‘object’ or ‘complement’ but in English, it is as SVC: the ‘subject’ followed by a ‘verb’ which is further followed by an ‘object’ or ‘complement’.

Also in Arabic personal pronouns can be omitted or embedded in an other word. For example in English you would say "I ate an apple", but in Arabic you just say "اكلت تفاحة- ate an apple".

In English normally an adjective would come before a noun, for example "red car". But in Arabic the previous example would be translated as "سيارة حمراء- car red". You can imagine how more complicated this this gets when you have a sentence longer than two words.

Arabic and English have two major types of tenses (e.g. present and past). Arabic has no progressive and perfective form of tenses. In Arabic, the present and past perfect tenses are treated as past simple. The present progressive is treated in Arabic as present simple but to indicate time "الآن - ‘alan" is used and similarly, the past progressive is used as past simple. The present and past perfect progressive tenses are not found in Arabic.

Another concept that doesn't exist in English but it does in Arabic, grammatical genders. an English word like teacher would have two translations in Arabic, one for the male and an other for the female. Also, English has two types of numbers. e.g. Singular (a teacher) vs. Plural (teachers), but Arabic has three types of numbers. e.g. Singular: "معلم - teacher", Dual: "معلمان - two teachers" and Plural: "معلمون - teachers"

Letters

The Arabic alphabet has 28 letters, that means two more letters than the English alphabet. There are some Arabic letters that have no English equivalent. In fact, some Arabic letters have special tones that are not found in any other language, which is why it takes foreign Arabic learners a least a year to accurately speak certain letters such as "Ein - ع" and "Khayn - خ".

Thinking Methods

Most Arabic translators face this challenge. When translating from English to Arabic, they have to switch their thinking method from the English way of thinking to the Arabic way.

Phrasal verbs are the perfect way to explain this. In English, the sentence ‘I think of/about something/someone/’ would translate to ‘I think in something’ or ‘I think by someone’. The use of prepositions in the two languages is very different, as is shown in the above example.

Summary

In conclusion to this discussion, translating Arabic texts into English necessitates a huge bilingual expertise. Moreover, the cultural and religious influences are very strong in both languages. It has been shown that though lexical problems are greater in number, grammatical, stylistic, usage and phonological problems are not insignificant. For example, Arabic has more inflexion than English. Translation programs at the undergraduate and postgraduate levels have become a common feature of universities and academic institutes due to the increasing demand in the job market. Therefore, teaching translation is often assigned to bilingual academics specializing in literature and/or linguistics. Translation is not merely about conveying meaning, it is something more.

Arabic to English Translation Services

Arabic to English translation is difficult, but with a team of professionals, it is doable. It requires highly skilled translators and linguists who have both technical knowledge and spoken knowledge of the two languages. You can find such professionals with us!

If you are looking for translation services online, you should consider EA Translations. We have a team of talented and dedicated professionals, most of whom have a years of experience in the translation industry. We provide high-quality affordable services that will always meet your deadline.

Get in touch with us to free quote!