Read Sindbad The Sailor: Three Adventures in Arabic

Literal but understandable

In this Arabic bilingual book, we translate words one by one and literally except in cases where this would harm understanding. E.g. here (reading right to left):

The natural word order would probably be somewhat different in English but that makes no difference: the phrase is still perfectly understandable so we keep it translated very literally.

We may also sometimes add implied words in English in brackets to help facilitate literal translation, like in this phrase:

The words "is the same" are not actually in the Arabic text but they are sort of implied, thus we add the English words in brackets to make the English more readable.

However, it would make little sense to translate Arabic expressions word-by-word. In such cases, we translate multiple words together as a single expression.

Comes with optional transcription

The default version of this e-book includes a third line on top of the Arabic words with romanization (a transcription of the Arabic text into Latin letters). The transcription is only indicative (not fully phonetic) but this helps learners who are not yet familiar with reading longer Arabic texts. Moreover, we also make available a separate version of the text without transcription for those that prefer to read it only in Arabic letters.

Arabic vowels (tashkīl) marked!

While vowels are normally not written in Arabic, we have added vowel marks (which are called tashkīl, of which we focused on adding ḥarakāt) to nearly all of the words in the Arabic text to help learners read and pronounce them in Arabic correctly.

Free audiobook included

To make the book even more learner-friendly, we asked a native Arabic speaker Dalia Ebrahim to make an in-house recording of the entire text of the book as an audiobook. The audiobook comes as a collection of mp3 audio files, which can be downloaded and played on your digital device. Best of all: the audiobook is free for all readers of the e-book!