Arabic idioms: a challenge for the translator

The main duty of a translator is to bridge a gap between two cultures by means of an interpretive act that makes the division between both cultures less visible. Characteristically, languages harbor a great deal of expressions and idioms that belong to a specific culture. These idioms are not born out of thin air and the translator must not turn a blind eye to them. In order to execute the translation task effectively, the translator must flex his muscles and set sail.

Why is Arabic written from right to left?

When learning Arabic, the challenge begins as soon as you realize you have to flick the pages of your student book backwards. Unless you would like to proceed to reading the book from the end all the way to the beginning, you will have to incorporate this fact into your Arabic-learning rituals.

Arabic Dictionaries: an ordeal for the learner?

Whether you are a writer, translator or simply learning a foreign language, a dictionary can be your best friend. In fact, even a native speaker of a given language has to resort -at some point in their lives- to dictionaries when facing an obscure term. These reference books do not only offer definitions of terms but also details on pronunciation, usage, etymology and oftentimes their translation into a preselected language.

Arabic Translations Gone Wrong

Whoever described translation as "the art which transforms everything so that nothing changes" has certainly not seen these Arabic > English translation blunders. These translation catastrophes actually did not transform anything to change everything!

Lost in Arabic Translation

Some of the most frequent questions we receive from our clients on a daily basis are: "which Arabic dialects do you translate into?" "what is your translator's native Arabic dialect?" "can you handle Gulf Arabic dialects for this particular project?" Our clients targeting a specific Arabic country seek to hire an in-country translator who does not only have a perfect command of Arabic, but is also aware of the lexical and cultural nuances.

9 qualities translation companies seek in a freelance translator

The availability of freelance services using the Internet as a means of communication, data transfer has meant the explosion of personal services offered from every corner of the world. Translation has not been immune to this. Having been a freelance offering Spanish translation services in the 90’s,…

Which is the most translated website in the world?

There are literally millions of websites out there, many of which contain several languages. Translating a website has become nowadays a basic business requirement. But which is the most translated website in the world? Which website is the champion when it comes to offering language versions…

Need a human translator to translate English to Arabic?

"I need to translate documents from English into Arabic ", "I need to translate a document from Arabic to English" are 2 common requests we hear every day at Pangeanic. Our English Arabic Translation Department is here to make the translation process as easy as possible.