The Instruction That Contradicts the Source
A nonprofit asks you to translate a 500-word fundraising appeal from English into Arabic for a Gulf-region donor audience. The instructions say: "Keep it under 500 words, keep the emotional tone, and use the formal register our donors expect." The English source opens with a second-person anecdote: "You wake up and the water is already gone." It includes a statistic ("1 in 3 households"), a Quranic allusion in a quotation, and a direct appeal ending "Give today." The client's sample of past appeals uses أنتم (plural formal "you") and long periodic sentences. Your draft runs 610 words.
1. The register instruction and the word cap appear to conflict. How do you reconcile them?
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They conflict only if formal register is equated with length. In Arabic formal prose, length often comes from coordination and formulaic framing, not from added content, so the cap can be met by tightening syntax while keeping أنتم, honorifics, and elevated diction. The real question is which instruction is controlling when they collide. The word cap is a hard constraint tied to the medium (a printed or emailed appeal with a fixed layout); register is a quality target. So meet the cap first, then audit whether the tightened text still sounds formal to the stated audience. If it does not, report the tension to the client with two short samples rather than silently exceeding the limit.
2. How do you handle the second-person anecdote and the closing imperative in formal Arabic?
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The anecdote's intimacy is not automatically at odds with formality - أنتم can carry direct address while remaining respectful, and Arabic appeals routinely address donors this way. The risk is that a literal "you wake up and the water is already gone" reads as an accusation of the donor rather than an invitation to imagine. Reframe the addressee's role explicitly: the donor is being asked to imagine another household's morning, not to picture their own. The closing "Give today" should become a respectful imperative consistent with the client's samples, not a bare command. Both moves preserve emotional force while matching the register the donors expect; neither requires adding words, which helps the cap.
3. The quotation contains a Quranic allusion. What is your obligation?
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Treat it as the highest-risk element in the text. Do not paraphrase, modernize, or "improve" scriptural wording; use the established Arabic text if the English is quoting or clearly alluding to a known verse, and verify the reference rather than reconstructing it from the English. If you cannot confirm the exact verse with confidence, do not guess - flag it to the client with the English passage and ask for the intended reference. Also check that the surrounding appeal does not place the verse in a context that could read as pressure or transactional. This is a compliance and accuracy issue that outranks tone and word count; a misquoted verse would damage the campaign far more than a slightly long sentence.