Students of advanced Spanish share a desire to use and understand the language, even as their backgrounds and goals for the language may vary widely. En otras palabras provides advanced learners of Spanish with hands-on manipulation of grammatical, lexical, and cultural detail through the practice of translation (traducción). This challenging and enjoyable textbook—now in its second edition with up-to-date texts on current events, new exercises, and new and expanded instructions—presents students with incisive grammar explanation, relevant lexical information, and a wide variety of translation texts and exercises in order to increase their mastery of the Spanish language.

En otras palabras contains Spanish texts to be translated into English as well as English texts for translation into Spanish. Translating into English requires students to understand every detail of the Spanish text and decide how these details might best be expressed in English. Translating into Spanish requires students to recognize how Spanish structures and words do—and do not—parallel those of English. Both activities provide advanced students of Spanish with an invigorating linguistic workout and serve as an effective introduction to the practice of translation.

Translation is a cultural as well as a linguistic activity; for students, learning how to translate provides invaluable experience of the inseparability of language and culture. En otras palabras addresses the errors made by advanced learners of Spanish while involving students in the pleasurable, problem-solving process of translation. This second edition contains a wide variety of usage-based exercises for both individual and group work. Concise and complete texts feature narrative and description, marketing and publicity materials, medical and legal topics, sports journalism, and internet posts.

En otras palabras is designed for a three-credit semester class; an online Instructor's Manual is provided at no charge to professors who adopt the text in their classrooms.

"Translation is like a reverse-engineering process—whereby, say, we might take apart a clock made of metal parts in order to build a functioning replica made entirely of plastic. Our final product will not look the same as the original clock, and it would be impossible to simply copy the designs of its inner workings, because plastic and metals have very different properties. For example, we cannot make small plastic springs or very thin gears of plastic. But these changes do not matter; the only thing that matters is that our replica will tell the time correctly.”—From the Introduction

The Georgetown Guide to Arabic-English Translation is an essential step-by-step, practical manual for advanced learners of Arabic interested in how to analyze and accurately translate nonfiction Arabic texts ranging from business correspondence to textbooks.

Mustafa Mughazy, a respected Arabic linguist, presents an innovative, functional approach that de-emphasizes word-for-word translation. Based on the Optimality Theory, it favors remaining faithful to the communicative function of the source material, even if this means adding explanatory text, reconfiguring sentences, paraphrasing expressions, or omitting words.

From how to select a text for translation or maintain tense or idiom, to how to establish translation patterns, The Georgetown Guide to Arabic-English Translation is useful both as a textbook and a reference. An invaluable set of appendices offers shortcuts to translate particularly difficult language like abbreviations, collocations, and common expressions in business correspondence, while authentic annotated texts provide the reader opportunities to practice the strategies presented in the book. A must-read for advanced learners of Arabic, this is a book every scholar and graduate-level student will wish to own.

Translating a work of literature from one language to another is an art form, in which the translated work becomes a "conduit" through which the reader of one language may pass into the cultural world of another. For the translator, the process of translation offers an intimate experience of the text that is perhaps unavailable even to the author. And yet, as M. R. Ghanoonparvar observes at the outset of this book, "every translation is inevitably a failure, with occasional moments of success."

In Translating the Garden, Ghanoonparvar allows readers to watch him in the process of translating Shahrokh Meskub's Goftogu dar Bagh(Dialogue in the Garden) from Persian into English. This short philosophical work uses a conversation between a writer and a painter to explore Persian perceptions of art, literature, nature, identity, and spirituality. As he translates the text, Ghanoonparvar discusses the myriad decisions that a literary translator faces, from word choices to the problems of conveying cultural concepts and deciphering authorial intent. He also compares some of his translated passages with those of other translators to highlight the uniqueness of each act of translation. The complete English translation of Dialogue in the Garden rounds out the volume.