The Importance of English-Arabic Translation

The following guide is dedicated to the English Arabic translation; it'll lay the light onto the definition of translation, the significance of English Arabic translation, the difficulty idioms inflict to translators, the qualities of a good translator and the requirement for translation in general.

Translation in Dr. Arabic Translation Services is:"the activity or process of sending from 1 language into another. It is the saying or rendering of awareness of phrases, sentences, and passages from 1 language into another" Ulm-ul-Qur'an, Dr. Hasanuddin Ahmed, I.A.S.

The Columbia Encyclopedia defines translation as the representation of a text to another language.

Katharine Barnwell (1986, p. 8).defines it as follows: Translation is re-telling, as exactly as possible, the meaning of the first message in a way which is natural in the language into which the translation is being made.

Translation is far more than the interpretation of the significance of a text in one language and the production of a new, equivalent text in another language, or the substitution of the words of one language with the words of a different language, or the rendering of significance of a text or at all in one language into another, it is the bridge of understanding and appreciation among people of different cultural groups, it is the way of communication among different classes of people, the means of cultural trade, the way of preserving cultural heritage of any nation, the way of forming ties and friendships among distinct groups of individuals, and the means of understanding and peace.

Human beings are not living independently andevery human being has the need and urge to know about one another, man tries to understand what other men and women do, how they're alive, and the way they have lived. We would love to understand, apart from our distinct ethnicity, color, language, and civilization, whether we share the exact same comprehension of passion, love, despair, aspiration, compassion, jealousy and a number of 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 overall sense, the objective of translation is to build bridges among different classes of people, but the goal of translation in the theoretical sense is to establish a relationship of equivalence between the source and the target language; it must ensure that both texts communicate the 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 them. It is a science in the sense that it needs complete understanding of the construction, grammar, semantics, and syntax and in general the make-up of the two languages concerned. It's an art since it requires artistic talent to rebuild the original text in the form of a product that is presentable to the reader who isn't assumed to be familiar with the original. It is also a skill, cause it takes attention to detail the meaning and a thorough understanding of the relationship between syntax and semantics, coupled with extensive cultural background and the capability to provide the translation of something with no equal in the target language.

Also being an individual ability, it enables human beings to swap ideas and thoughts irrespective of the different languages that they use. Man is blessed with the capability to convey his feelings and experience to others through language. With this procedure for communication man acquired both spoken language and the written speech, but if human beings spread over the globe, their languages differed and they had a means whereby they may communicate and interact with each others. Thus necessity for translation to convey the feelings and experiences into the other language was felt.

Occasionally we ask ourselves, why is translation between English and Arabic important? Both Arabic and English are of the planet great languages, at the book'The Spread of English, on page 77 the author says:"the great languages of today are languages of empire, past and current. Just two, Mandarin Chinese and Russian, continue as languages of government within one, ethno linguistically diverse countries. Others -Arabic, English, French, and Spanish-are royal legacies, having survived the disintegration of the empires that fostered them."

Arabic language is just one of the excellent world languages. There have been fantastic languages of great empires that did not survive as a great language, like Turkish for instance, when we compare Turkish with Arabic, we find out that Arabic survived the disintegration of the Arab Islamic empire and it continues to be among the fantastic languages of the world before today, while the Turkish language that was the language of administration and authority at the middle east, Balkans, and different parts of the planet which was under the Ottoman rule for several thousand years,but Turkish at the phrases of Fishman on page 77 from the publication'The Spread of English"'flowed back to Anatolia with the collapse of the ottoman empire'. But these words are not 100% true because Turkish is spoken all over Turkey and in Northern Cyprus, not only in Anatolia which is only a part of Turkey. Moreover the languages of Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, are branches of the Turkic language family. However, no denying that Turkish speech lost a lot of its importance after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire.

Returning to Arabic, it's one of the six official languages adopted in The United Nations. Language is the language of a rich culture and civilization dating back many centuries; it was the speech of Muhammad, the Messenger and Prophet of Allah (Allah is the Arabic word for God), and it's the language of the Holy Qura'an. Between the eighth and the fifteenth centuries, the quantity of literary, scholarly and scientific book production in Arabic and also the level of urban literacy among readers of Arabic were the highest the world had known to that time. Islamic artists have used Arabic script as their main art form for centuries; the beauty of their work will be shown to anyone throughout the analysis of Arabic. Arabic is a part of the Semitic group of languages, closely related to Hebrew and Aramaic, the language the Christ discussed. Additionally, Arabic is widely spoken; complete speakers of Arab exceed 350 million.

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


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

Not only those words English borrowed from Arabic, but there are hundreds of different words borrowed from Arabic, there are some hundreds of those words English borrowed from Arabic in Al Mawrid English-Arabic dictionary, for example typhoon meaning 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, particularly English Arabic translation.