Translate from Arabic into English, and find your first work

Dear reader,

This week I spent two evenings on one sentence.^{Note 11}1 Full stop: an Arabic sentence can run long, joined by commas and little words such as wa, “and”. English often wants it cut into shorter ones. It was a short passage from a story about a woman waiting for her brother at a bus station, and in Arabic it ran across the whole line without a full stop. I knew what every word meant. I still could not make it sound like a sentence in English.

The first version followed the Arabic word for word, and it was awful.^{Note 22}2 Word for word: a translation that follows the source one word at a time. It is a good first draft and a poor last one. The second was smooth and left out a clause I liked. The third put the clause back and the sentence lost its breath. By the fifth I had broken it in two, kept the waiting at the end and let the second half be shorter than the first. I read it aloud and it worked.

What I did not do was open a dictionary until the fourth try.^{Note 33}3 Source: the text you translate from, here the Arabic one. What you write is the target. New translators often begin with the dictionary and end up translating words, one at a time. I begin by asking what the sentence is doing, who is speaking and what they would say in English if they were standing next to me. Then I write something rough and fix it.

Choose one sentence from something you are reading in Arabic this week and translate it three times. Keep every version, even the bad ones, and put them in a row. Next week I will show you which dictionary I open first, and why.