Arabic
Translation Services

Translation

• Editing
• Proofreading
• Machine Translation engine building
• Machine Translation post-editing
• Desktop publishing
• Voiceover & dubbing
• Subtitling & closed captions
• Flash & multimedia localization
• Linguistic testing
• Functional testing
• Interpretation

The Arabic language is a member of the Semitic group of the Afro-Asiatic language family. Within the Semitic group, Arabic has by far the largest number of speakers – more than 200 million. Other significant members of the Semitic group include Amharic and Tigrinya (both spoken in Ethiopia), and Hebrew.

Arabic, in both its literary form and many colloquial forms, is a descendant of the Classical Arabic language of the 6th century CE. The literary language used throughout the Middle East and North Africa is known as Modern Standard Arabic (MSA). It is the official language of all Arab countries, one of the six official languages of the United Nations, and is the only form of the language taught in schools.

Colloquial Arabic is a collection of numerous national and regional dialects, many of which are mutually unintelligible. The local dialect is the native language of area’s population, while MSA is subsequently learned in school. The differences in vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation between the local dialect and MSA result in both diglossia, the normal use of two varieties of the same language, as well as code-switching, changing between dialect and MSA even within the same sentence.+

Arabic is written from right to left in a cursive style. The writing system is an abjad alphabet, where each letter represents a consonant with the associated vowel being inferred by the reader. Although Arabic does have diacritical marks to indicate short vowels, these are rarely used in general writing. As long vowels normally are written, the Arabic alphabet is not a “pure” abjad. This type of writing system is well-suited to Arabic, in which roots typically comprise three consonants and the particular set of vowels used in conjunction with those consonants supplies the specific meaning. For example, the words for book, books, writer, writing, copy, correspond, dictate, etc. are all based on the tri-consonantal root “k-t-b”.

The Arabic alphabet has 28 basic letters, although adaptations of the Arabic script used for other languages, such as Farsi, Urdu, Malay, etc., have additional letters. Because Arabic is written in a cursive style, each letter may have as many as 4 forms – isolated, initial, medial, and final – depending upon its position within a word and the letters (if any) that precede and/or follow it.