The Importance of English-Arabic Translation

This article is devoted to the English Arabic translation; it'll lay the light on the definition of translation, the significance of English Arabic translation, the difficulty idioms impose to translators, the qualities of a fantastic translator and also the necessity for translation generally.

Translation in Dr. Hasanuddin Ahmed's words is:"the action or process of delivering from 1 language into another. It's the expression or rendering of sense of phrases, sentences, and passages etc from one language into another." Ulm-ul-Qur'an, Dr. Hasanuddin Ahmed, I.A.S.

Arabic Translation defines translation as the rendering of a text to another language.

Katharine Barnwell (1986, p. 8).defines it as follows: Translation is re-telling, as exactly as you can, the significance of the first message in a means that is natural in the language to which the translation has been made.

Translation is far more than the interpretation of the meaning of a text in one language and the creation of a new, equivalent text in another language, or the substitution of the words of a single language with the words of another language, or the representation of meaning of a text or whatsoever in one language into the other, it is the bridge of appreciation and understanding among people of different cultural groups, it is the way of communication among different classes of people, the way of cultural trade, the means of preserving cultural heritage of any state, the means of forming friendships and ties among different groups of people, and the way of understanding and peace.

Human beings are after all not living independently and, every human being has the need and urge to understand about one another, man tries to learn what other people are doing, how they're alive, and the way they've lived. We'd like to understand, apart from our distinct ethnicity, color, language, and culture, whether we share the exact same comprehension of love, passion, despair, aspiration, sympathy, jealousy and many other respects of human nature. So provided that the desire to exists, translation will be the only bridge across which our goals are attained and our want realized.
In the general sense, the objective of translation is to create bridges among different classes of people, but the objective of translation from the theoretical sense is to establish a relationship of equivalence between the source and the target language; it should ensure that both texts communicate the exact same message.

There has been debate as to whether translation is an art, a science, or even a Skill. I believe Translation is a combination of all of these. It's a science in the sense that it needs complete knowledge of the construction, grammar, semantics, and syntax and generally the make-up of the two languages involved. It's an art since it requires artistic talent to rebuild the original text in the form of a item that is presentable to the reader who isn't supposed to be knowledgeable about the original. It is also a skill, cause it requires attention to detail the significance and a thorough understanding of the connection between syntax and semantics, coupled with extensive cultural heritage and the ability to offer the translation of something with no equal in the target language.

Being an individual skill, it enables human beings to swap ideas and thoughts regardless of the various languages they use. Man is blessed with the ability to communicate his feelings and expertise to others through language. With this procedure for communication man obtained both spoken language and the written language, but when human beings spread across the earth, their languages differed and they needed a way whereby they may communicate and interact with others. So necessity for translation to convey the feelings and feelings to another language has been sensed.

Sometimes we ask ourselves, why is translation between English and Arabic important? Both Arabic and English are of the world great languages, at the publication'The Spread of English, on page 77 the author says:"the fantastic languages of today are languages of empire, both past and present. Only two, Mandarin Chinese and Russian, continue as languages of government within single, ethno linguistically diverse states. The others -Arabic, English, French, and Spanish-are imperial legacies, having survived the disintegration of the empires that fostered them."

Arabic language is one of the excellent world languages. There happen to be great languages of great empires which didn't survive as a fantastic language, like Turkish for instance, when we compare Turkish , we find out that Arabic lived the disintegration of the Arab Islamic empire and it has been one of the fantastic languages of the world before today, although the Turkish language that was the language of authority and administration at the middle east, Balkans, and different parts of the world which was under the Ottoman rule for several thousand decades,but Turkish at the phrases of Fishman on page 77 from the publication'The Spread of English"'flowed back to Anatolia with the meltdown of the ottoman empire'. However, these words aren't 100% accurate because Turkish is spoken around Turkey and in Northern Cyprus, not only in Anatolia which is just part of Turkey. Additionally Turkish minorities from the former Soviet Union republics, Bulgaria, Russia, Greece, and Romania use Turkish as their mother tongue. Yet, no denying that Turkish language lost lots of its importance after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire.

Returning to Arabic, it is but one of the six official languages embraced from The United Nations. Arabic is the language of a rich culture and civilization dating back many centuries; it had been the language of Muhammad, the Messenger and Prophet of Allah (Allah is the Arabic term for God), and it's the language of the Holy Qura'an. It has generated great figures like Averroes(Ibn-Roshd), the medieval Aristotelian philosopher; Ibn Khaldun, the very first social historian; and Khalil Jibran. Between the eighth and the fifteenth centuries, the quantity of literary, scholarly and scientific book production in Arabic and also the amount of metropolitan literacy among subscribers of Arabic were the greatest the world had known to that moment. Islamic artists have used Arabic script as their principal art form for centuries; the beauty of the work will be revealed to anybody through the study of Arabic. Language is a part of the Semitic group of languages, closely related to Hebrew and Aramaic, the language the Christ discussed. Moreover, Arabic is widely spoken; complete speakers of Arabic exceed 350 million.

According to the Wikipedia encyclopedia, Arabic was also a major vehicle of culture, especially in science, math and philosophy during the middle ages, that's why many European languages have also borrowed a lot of words out of it.


"English has borrowed from Arabic algebra, vanilla, orange, lemon, sugar, and magazine."

Not only those words English borrowed from Arabic, but there are countless other words borrowed from Arabic, but there are some hundreds of the words English borrowed from Arabic in Al Mawrid English-Arabic dictionary, such as typhoon which means in Arabic 7HA'F, Spinach 3('F., along with sesame meaning in Arabic 3E3E.

So Arabic being among the world great languages makes translation into that language very important, especially English translation.