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English to Arabic and Arabic to English document translations of the highest quality — meeting your needs with our services. We guarantee:
- Translators who are native speakers of the target language, whether it is English or Arabic
- ISO 9001 and ISO 17001 quality standard compliance
- Localization expertise in your line of work (medicine, engineering, etc.)
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See below, what kind of changes to the text might be expected for translations from English to Arabic or vice versa.
Translation differences
Translation from English to Arabic or vice versa entails certain changes in the resulting text. These changes are caused by the inherent differences between the languages. The following things in your order might be affected:
- The layout of the resulting text
- Time it takes to translate
- Translation complexity
Among other factors, these parameters can influence the final price as well. The layout factor is especially important to those, who are interested in our DTP (Desktop Publishing) services.
| Parameter | To English | To Arabic | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| Writing system | Latin (English alphabet) | Arabic (Arabic abjad) | Different writing systems: drastic difference |
| Text direction | left-to-right | right-to-left | Different |
| Characters per word (average) | 6 | 6 | None |
| Text length (characters) | 49% longer | 33% shorter | Noticeable |
| Overall difference | Noteworthy | ||
Text length and document layout
The main factors influencing the length and layout of the translated document are:
- Writing system of the target language
- Writing direction
- Word length
- Relative lengths of the texts
Writing system
English uses Latin alphabet, whereas Arabic employs Arabic abjad. It may make the translated text shorter or longer than the original, and makes selecting the correct font for the target language essential. Given the same font size, Latin symbols are generally 67% larger than the Arabic ones.
Writing direction
English is read left-to-right, but Arabic — right-to-left. It means that, in the translated document, the order of the text and visual elements should be reversed. This is crucial for technical documents and visual instructions, and demands additional work from the DTP specialists.
Word length
Both languages have 6 characters per word, on average. This promises a relatively similar formatting of your documents, provided that the rest of the parameters are not too different.
Text length
On average, documents translated to English are 49% longer than source texts in Arabic. On the other hand, Arabic texts are 33% shorter than their English counterparts. It means that some formatting differences are to be expected in the translated texts. Please note, that the actual visual length is also influenced by the font used.
Word order
Depending on your needs, the word order might be rather important for the translation. Things like slogans and brand names may convey an entirely different meaning, if their word order is changed.
The standard word orders of the languages are different. Various sentence structures may still be possible, but they might have a different meaning or change their style.
Dialects and varieties
Both languages in question have regional varieties, which can be quite distinctive. For localization purposes it is essential to choose the right form or dialect to translate to. While all types of the language will probably be understood by all users, the different spellings and stylistic differences can influence how understandable and trustworthy your text is to a particular local audience. English has 3 major varieties: US, UK, and Australian. As for Arabic, it has
- Modern Standard
- Tunisian
- Algerian
- Moroccan
- Egyptian
- Lebanese
- Mesopotamian
- Gulf
- Hejazi
- Sanaani Arabic
- Maltese
- Jordanian
- Northern Jordanian
- Syrian
varieties, 14 in total.
If you are not sure, which form to choose for your document, the safe choice is the more widespread one, or the one understood by most speakers. For English, it is the US variety, and it is Modern Standard Arabic for the Arabic language.
Translation complexity
Translation complexity is partially dependent on how closely the languages are related. The further apart the languages are, the more time and effort it takes to express an idea from one language in another one. As a consequence, it affects the price and time it takes to translate a document between English and Arabic.
The languages in question belong to different families — English is Indo-European, while Arabic is Afro-Asiatic. It means that a relatively more skilled translator is needed for the job, especially if technical documents, e.g. patents, are in question.