Translation (Arabic–English and English–Arabic)
Translation (الترجمة)
The paper sets both directions. Arabic→English tests whether you can carry meaning, register and cohesion into natural English; English→Arabic tests whether you can produce correct MSA structures rather than word-for-word calques. Marks are split between accuracy and target-language quality, so a faithful but ungrammatical version still loses heavily.
Core rules: Arabic → English
- الإضافة reverses: كتاب الطالب = the student’s book / the book of the student.
- The Arabic nominal sentence has no copula; supply ‘is/was’: الجوّ بارد = the weather is cold.
- A maṣdar plus preposition is usually an English gerund or noun clause: بعد وصوله = after his arrival / after he arrived.
- قد + past ≈ ‘may have / has indeed’; كان + imperfect ≈ ‘used to / was doing’.
- و can mean and, while, so or although - decide from the logic, not the dictionary.
Core rules: English → Arabic
- Drop ‘to be’ in present nominal sentences; keep verb–subject order where the verb is the point of the sentence.
- English passive → مبني للمجهول or an impersonal plural: أُجّل الاجتماع.
- Relative clauses need a resumptive pronoun: التقرير الذي نُشر.
- Numbers: 3–10 take a plural genitive (ثلاثة كتبٍ); 11–99 take a singular accusative (أحد عشر كتابًا).
Worked example
‘The report, which was published last week, was not discussed by the committee.’ → «التقريرُ الذي نُشر الأسبوعَ الماضي لم تناقشْه اللجنةُ.» Reasoning: a definite subject opens the sentence, so the relative clause follows it; نُشر carries the passive; because the object precedes the verb, the verb agrees with it in gender and the object is resumed by the suffix ـه. Translating literally as لم يناقش التقرير would leave the wrong agreement.
Traps
Loan translation (بناءً على rendered as ‘building on’), untranslated proper names in the wrong spelling, and drifting into dialect in the Arabic version.