Perhaps owing to Arab history itself and the fact its traces have been covered by the sands of the Saudi and African deserts, where their nomadic people roamed in the dawn of civilization.
Considered part of the Semitic peoples who inhabited the Arabian peninsula, which currently encompasses Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain, Oman and Yemen, the Arabs are assumed to have originated from “Shem, son of Noah"—hence the name Semite.
It is believed they lived on the Arabian Gulf as independent groups.
The geography and natural factors of the peninsula would have influenced the formation of Arab tribes and their respective way of life and relations with other civilizations.

The oldest text to mention the word “Arab" is from the Assyrian writings of King Shalmaneser III, who used the pronunciation “Arab" to determine principalities or captaincies in the deserts surrounding Assyria.
The first to cite the Arabs among the Greeks was Aeschylus 456-505 BC, followed by Herodotus 425-484 BC, who denominated as “Arabae" all groups located in the Arabian Peninsula, east from the Nile and the Sinai desert, without taking into account the differences between tribes and dialects.

Yet it was only in 610 AD that Arabic attained the importance that renders it, today, the language of more than 250 million people in 22 nations—who share the same historical and cultural heritage, albeit preserving their peculiarities.

In that year the prophet Mohammad initiated his calling to Islam and converted the Arabs into a new religion, which spread beyond the borders of the Arabian peninsula.
In one century’s time, the Islamic religion expanded throughout the Iberian Peninsula, North Africa and Central Africa, all of the Middle East and Central Asia, leading to the emergence of both an Arab-Islamic State and a civilization comprised by many other non-Arab peoples and nations.

A civilization that has contributed to human development by reshaping art, philosophy, medicine, astronomy, mathematics, physics and navigation, in addition to providing great service to humanity with the preservation of Greek, Roman and Byzantine cultures.

Perhaps owing to Arab history itself and the fact its traces have been covered by the sands of the Saudi and African deserts, where their nomadic people roamed in the dawn of civilization.
Considered part of the Semitic peoples who inhabited the Arabian peninsula, which currently encompasses Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain, Oman and Yemen, the Arabs are assumed to have originated from “Shem, son of Noah"—hence the name Semite.
It is believed they lived on the Arabian Gulf as independent groups.
The geography and natural factors of the peninsula would have influenced the formation of Arab tribes and their respective way of life and relations with other civilizations.

The oldest text to mention the word “Arab" is from the Assyrian writings of King Shalmaneser III, who used the pronunciation “Arab" to determine principalities or captaincies in the deserts surrounding Assyria.
The first to cite the Arabs among the Greeks was Aeschylus 456-505 BC, followed by Herodotus 425-484 BC, who denominated as “Arabae" all groups located in the Arabian Peninsula, east from the Nile and the Sinai desert, without taking into account the differences between tribes and dialects.

Yet it was only in 610 AD that Arabic attained the importance that renders it, today, the language of more than 250 million people in 22 nations—who share the same historical and cultural heritage, albeit preserving their peculiarities.

In that year the prophet Mohammad initiated his calling to Islam and converted the Arabs into a new religion, which spread beyond the borders of the Arabian peninsula.
In one century’s time, the Islamic religion expanded throughout the Iberian Peninsula, North Africa and Central Africa, all of the Middle East and Central Asia, leading to the emergence of both an Arab-Islamic State and a civilization comprised by many other non-Arab peoples and nations.

A civilization that has contributed to human development by reshaping art, philosophy, medicine, astronomy, mathematics, physics and navigation, in addition to providing great service to humanity with the preservation of Greek, Roman and Byzantine cultures.

Challenges of the language

A central Semite language akin to Hebrew and the non-Aramaic languages, Arabic has many geographically distributed variants, among which classic Arabic, modern Arabic and colloquial Arabic.

Classic Arabic is the language used in the Koran, thus considered normative. Because of the difficulty in translating some concepts of Arab or Islam cultures per se, Muslims traditionally believe it impossible to translate the holy book without betraying the text’s original meaning.
That is why, unlike other languages that evolved over time, Arabic holds its characteristics intact.

Colloquial or dialectal Arabic refers to the several national or regional variants that shape oral language, used mostly in informal spoken media outlets, such as soap operas or advertising—not by chance, many linguists regard them as languages apart from Arabian.
As per the standard modern Arabic (often referred to as literary Arabic), it is the version taught in schools and universities, and used in business environments, government bodies and the media.

Those many variants would already suffice to render it challenging to anyone who dare face it, yet still another aspect makes Arabic even more complex to comprehend and assimilate: in Arabic, a word may be a name, a verb or a proposition.
There are no distinct categories for adjectives, adverbs, etc. as in Portuguese.

Containing 28 letters written from right to left, which can form up to 84 different ways of writing, depending on the position they have in the beginning, in the middle, or the end of the word, Arabic underscores the consonants and the use of vowels is optional. Books are read backwards.

Despite being the second language to have most contributed towards vocabulary growth in the Portuguese and Spanish languages, second only to Latin, the Arabic alphabet has five letters without correspondence in Portuguese.
That is why it is common to resort to better known and diffused languages in a work of translation in Arab, such as English, French, Spanish or German—whose influence spans back to the political-economic domination of the world powers in the region.
With globalization, the expansion of technological resources, and the Internet, which all boosted the influence of different languages over other tongues, translating documents from Arabic into another language requires added care—and even more so in the case of translating technical standards and documents.

Writing as art

Calligraphy is also an aspect that should be taken into account when translating Arabic.
Cursive by nature, its composition is often abstract.
The Arabic speaking community actually considers writing an art form of the highest degree and, not by chance, they are used in paintings, tapestries and silverware.

Such perfectionism led All Tasks, when first taking up translation works from Portuguese into Arabic, to use bamboo pens and thoroughly follow the entire printing process of the document at the printer shop.
Although computers are used today, supervising the printing process is still required.

For having many similar symbols that represent different letters and sounds, distinct only as to small traces or dots, Arabic is a difficult language to learn.
Another reason for the translation of documents, whether literary or technical, involving the Arabic language to be made by a specialized company.

Translating Arabic into Portuguese also requires using Double Byte Character Sets.
As occurs with Japanese, Mandarin or Korean, there are no spaces between the different characters, which may bring up problems such as the presence of disconnected lines.
In the case of Arabic (Hebrew and Urdu as well), there is still need to use a DIR tag (Unicode Directional Algorithm) that signals the direction in which a text should be read.
A good translation company should have access to that technology and to highly skilled professionals to translate Arabic into any other language.