You don’t need a native speaker of the target language, i.e. English, to translate Arabic to English.

Translators from Arabic to English who are native of the target language is a rare species. You are looking for something you wouldn’t find in Middle East market.

Learning Arabic is not an easy task, let alone to learn translation. Translation is not about bilingualism. It is about a professional how is trained to translate Arabic to English or vice versa. It is not enough to know how to speak two languages to translate between them.

What to translate Arabic to English?

So the best solution to finding your translatorial partner who you can trust to translate Arabic to English your scripts or marketing collaterals is to look for someone who is qualified and trained to do your job done. Each language of this pair has different characteristics. Of course, this is not limited to writing from left to right or right to left.

Differences are wider and aren’t restricted even to vocabularies. It is also deeply rooted in the construction of each language. To translate Arabic to English is to know that English has a different way than Arabic to handle linguistic constructs (phrases, sentences, paragraphs, etc…), and to realize such differences that exist between any pair of languages helps translators know where in the text should rearrange, introduce new words, or even delete existent words.

Many tactics are required by the translator to give a translation product that sounds natural in the target language.

Let me explain how with some examples that are prerequisites to professionals who effectively translate Arabic to English.

They say that English loves passive and Arabic loves active. That means when I want to translate Arabic to English a passive sentence, my first option should be to look for a solution that is a passive sentence.

Translation is of course difficult.

Look at google translate and try to use it to translate Arabic to English. You would find that google translate doesn’t even recognize a simple difference between Arabic and English.

An example, when you want to translate Arabic to English a construct like لوحة الطريق, google translate will give you ‘panel way’ (backtranslation: طريق اللوحة) and not even ‘way panel’.

With all its almighty, google couldn’t so far teach google translate to translate Arabic to English these two word construct properly by swapping the order in which the two words appear.

Don’t settle for translators who can’t understand the tiny differences of the two languages.

With a competent translator, you can translate Arabic to English with peace of mind.