I just had the pleasure of joining the twelfth iteration of the Beirut Exchange in early January, a 10-day political conference and exchange run by Mideastwire.com. While discussing the politics of Lebanon as well as Syria some 12-14 hours a day, I couldn't help but notice some of the terminological issues that came up as we talked about these issues in English and Arabic.

One of the headline topics through 2014 and 2015 is of course the rise of the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant, aka the Islamic State in Iraq and Sham, ISIL, ISIS, the Islamic State, IS, Daesh, etc. Western usage seems to have moved towards ISIS over time while Arabic usage prefers the corresponding Arabic acronym داعِش Daesh (IPA: /da:ʕeʃ/). I find it unfortunate that in both Arabic and English we insist on using the old names of ISIS/Daesh, even as the group's current name is simply 'the Islamic State'. Even as I may or may not like the group, I have a strong bias towards calling entities by their own names for themselves. We don't object to using other charged and questionably accurate names like the Islamic Revolution of Iran, Hezbollah 'the Party of God', or for that matter the Holy Roman Empire, so why can't we stomach typing the two words 'Islamic State'? I trust readers to be able to read the actual name and still make up their minds out about it.

We can divide the Islamic State's current situation into two pieces. On the one hand, there is the contiguous territory it controls in Iraq and Syria, a piece of territory so large and with such large revenues that it makes it unlike any other 'terror' group that has come before it and indeed makes it look much more state-like than say Al-Qaeda ever did. However, on the other hand there is currently the phenomenon of jihadi groups around the world (in Tunisia, Egypt, etc.) now 'pledging allegiance' to IS. In Arabic, the term for this is بَيْعَة bay'ah and there are a few options floating around in English. We can find "swear allegiance" and "pledge allegiance" as the verb and "pledge of allegiance" and "oath of allegiance" as the noun. As an American, I shy away from "pledge of allegiance" in this context because that term is already taken here in the US, but I don't find it wrong per se. In my own translating, I prefer 'swear' as the verb and 'oath' as the noun unless I find a reason to do otherwise.

Many people talk about how the Islamic State took advantage of a 'security void' (Arabic: فراغ أمني), but for me the clearly preferred term is 'security vacuum'. I find some 150,000 hits for the latter compared to 50,000 hits for the former, with many of these coming from presumably non-native writers from websites in the Arab world. I likewise would generally prefer 'presidential vacuum' for the فراغ رئاسي faraagh ri'aasi that Lebanon is still going through currently.

A similarly tricky topic is talking about various parties' 'involvement' or 'intervention' in conflicts. In Arabic, two terms are frequently used: تورط tawarruT and تدخل tadakhul, and each has its problems in translation. The first can mean 'involvement' but also carries connotations of 'entanglement', so when I hear it, I hear an Iraqi or Vietnamese-style 'quagmire' lurking behind the word. It is frequently used to describe, for example, Hezbollah's involvement in Syria, one which Lebanese critics say in the end can not help but bring the Syrian Civil War to Lebanon. The second term, تدخل tadakhul, is tricky in its own right. It can run from a somewhat positive meaning like 'intervene' to a very negative one like 'interfere'. Multiple times in Lebanon, I was surprised by people saying things in English like "the West needs to interfere" where they didn't mean the negative connotation that 'interfere' brings with it.

I even found terminological problems in referring to political issues themselves! Many commentators are now talking in English about things like "the Iranian nuclear file" or "the Palestinian file", but this usage leaves me wanting. I certainly get the image of a number of files sitting in a desk, but it strikes me how little I encounter such usage outside of the circles of Middle Eastern politics. One factor that's helping this usage is that is a literal translation of Arabic ملف 'file', for example in الملف النووي الإيراني 'the Iranian nuclear file'. 

To be clear, this usage of 'file' is not exactly wrong or non-native, but it is highly specialized: a quick look at google hits for 'the Iranian nuclear file' finds sites from the Washington, DC think tank world and some Middle Eastern English-language publications. For a general audience, I would prefer the more natural sounding 'Iranian nuclear issue' which is approximately ten times more common on the web. There is even the European variant 'Iranian nuclear dossier' which betrays its origin in pan-European English by its presence on webpages from France, Beligum, Romania, Switzerland, and Carnegie Europe, all on the first page of google hits alone.

Lastly I am interested in discussing what are called in Arabic خروقات جوية/خروق جوية literally 'aerial violations' - i.e. overflights of Lebanese territory by the Israeli Defense Force. A classic Arabic usage shows up for example in this article: خروق جوية وتحركات معادية على الحدود في القطاع الشرقي, 'Violations of Lebanese airspace and hostile mobilizations on the border of the Eastern sector'. Whereas Arabic like to use this term by itself, the best English rendering generally involves a bit of rewriting or reorganization to phrases like 'violation of Lebanese airspace', 'breach of Lebanese airspace', or 'violation of Lebanese sovereignty'. Finally, here are a few examples of these usages from the English web: "an Israeli reconnaissance aircraft also violated the country’s airspace on Wednesday" (source), "Israeli fighter jets violate Lebanese airspace" (source), or "Since the civil war, Israel has routinely breached Lebanese airspace" (source).

While recently doing a set of Arabic-English legal translations for an Algerian company, I was struck that some of the word choices in the Arabic were quite different than what is commonly used in eastern parts of the Arab world, i.e. the Gulf, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Egypt, where most of my work comes from and indeed where the majority of the Arab world lives. This post lays out just a few of the less common uses that caught my eye and tracks their source to be a mix of good old regional variation as well as influence from French and/or Spanish. Here are a few of the differences I noted:

Some of these differences, like the question between حصص (hisas) and أسهم (ashum) for 'shares', aren't that drastic. At other points, however, these documents used extremely rare terms instead of their common counterparts. For example, they talked about ترتيبات القانون (tartiibaat al-qaanuun) instead of أحكام القانون (ahkaam al-qaanuun) "provisions of law" even though the latter phrase has 394,000 google hits compared to the 843 of the former. Outside of this context, the word tartiibaat usually means "arrangements," which is shown well by this forum on استفسارات العروس وترتيبات وتجهيزات الزفاف (istifsaaraat al-3aruus wa-tartiibaat wa-tajhiizaat al-zafaaf) "Bridal questions and wedding arrangements and supplies." Where these hits are coming from shows what is going on: the first link for ترتيبات (tartiibaat) above is the facebook page of an Algerian news site, and four of the remaining results have Moroccan domain names. Clearly, this is a regional variant.

Having seen this example that the written Arabic of North Africa has some divergences compared with that of the Middle East, we can also find a clear French/Spanish influence in using the term رأس المال الاجتماعي (ra's al-maal al-ijtimaa'i) as opposed to رأس مال الشركة (ra's maal al-sharika) for company capital. The difference in how much each is used isn't as drastic here; رأس المال الاجتماعي (ra's al-maal al-ijtimaa'i) has 78,500 hits, and رأس مال الشركة (ra's maal al-sharika) has 344,000. The thing to note here is that while the second literally means "the company's capital", the first actually means "social capital" but they don't mean it in the sociological value of social networks sense. Instead, it is a calque from French (and also Spanish) where société (Spanish: sociedad) means company and thus capital social means "company capital".

The last difference I will address is between مبالغ (mabaaligh) and قيم (qiyam) 'amounts of money'. The former normally means 'amount of money' and the latter means 'value', so other Arab writers might even use the two together and write things like دفع مبلغ قيمته (daf' mablagh qiimatuhu) 'payment of an amount with the value of [i.e. equaling]', and indeed Arabic writers have written that exact phrase 35,200 times on the internet. However, my text used قيم (qiyam) with the meaning of مبالغ (mabaaligh), and thus made quite rare constructions like قيمة تتم دفعها (qiima tatimm daf'uha) 'an amount to be paid' which is only on the web 196 times as opposed to the much more common مبلغ يتم دفعه (mablagh yatimm daf'uhu) which has been spotted in the wild 38,100 times.

These were just a few examples that got my interest, but the reality is that we as translators are faced with this kind of variation all day everyday. Paying attention to where exactly our text comes from helps, as does remembering that context is king.

Sayed Kashua made a huge impact among Israelis recently when he wrote a column titled "It's over" (Hebrew: זה נגמר) in which he says that the dream of Arab-Jewish coexistence in Israel is dead. Kashua is famous for being a Palestinian-Israeli journalist at the respected national paper Haaretz and the writer of the groundbreaking TV series Arab Labor (Hebrew: עבודה ערבית; Arabic: شغل عرب). But those who could only read his piece in what is a generally good English translation on Haaretz's website titled "Why Sayed Kashua is leaving Jerusalem and never coming back" missed some crucial details because of a few serious translation mistakes that should never have been made.

In his segment "Think About It", Faisal Salman comments on the meaning of peace and security amidst the entrance of Lebanese forces into Dahiyeh in South Beirut and the fact that Hezbollah forces continue to fight on the ground in Syria.

For more background, see this Al-Monitor article.

Inspired by a very interesting NPR story on Chinese reactions to America's partial federal government shutdown, I thought English readers might be interested in seeing what the Arab press has to say about the issue. Here is Jihad Al-Khazen on the shutdown and American-Iranian diplomacy.

During my weekly medical interpreting, I've had the chance to speak with patients of several nationalities, especially Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, and Argentinians. I've also been able to chat with dozens of Spanish-speaking healthcare professionals, patients, and other interpreters and learned various ways to express medical ideas in Spanish. Here are 4 points for English-speaking interpreters, translators, and healthcare professionals.

Syrian rebels have reportedly captured the Governor of Raqqa, Hassan Jalili, and the local head of the Baath party, Suleiman Suleiman. I have translated portions of the amateur video including statements by the two men as well as rebel fighters.

Recently, the Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad's gave a rare interview in which he admitted the huge toll of the conflict in Syria on children, saying that "Children are the most fragile link in any society and unfortunately they often pay the heaviest price in any conflict." (Read more on syriacomment) Against that backdrop, it seems appropriate to translate Habib Haddad's 2-27 cartoon published online in Al Hayat:

I thought I would inaugurate this blog by linking to a very funny post at translationjournal.blogspot.com discussing the idea of adding little fees to our translation pricing the way mechanics and the phone company do. The poor customer's bill would look something like this:

I'm sure that customers shopping for translations appreciate transparent pricing, where a quote of $50 means $50 exactly, no less and no more!