Communities

Writing
Writing
Codidact Meta
Codidact Meta
The Great Outdoors
The Great Outdoors
Photography & Video
Photography & Video
Scientific Speculation
Scientific Speculation
Cooking
Cooking
Electrical Engineering
Electrical Engineering
Judaism
Judaism
Languages & Linguistics
Languages & Linguistics
Software Development
Software Development
Mathematics
Mathematics
Christianity
Christianity
Code Golf
Code Golf
Music
Music
Physics
Physics
Linux Systems
Linux Systems
Power Users
Power Users
Tabletop RPGs
Tabletop RPGs
Community Proposals
Community Proposals
tag:snake search within a tag
answers:0 unanswered questions
user:xxxx search by author id
score:0.5 posts with 0.5+ score
"snake oil" exact phrase
votes:4 posts with 4+ votes
created:<1w created < 1 week ago
post_type:xxxx type of post
Search help
Notifications
Mark all as read See all your notifications »
Q&A

Post History

50%
+0 −0
Q&A How to write Arabic in dialogue for an English piece?

I'd use the phonetic spelling, unless you're planning to publish in a country where both Arabic and English are commonplace. The reason is that it's easier for someone used to the latin alphabeth...

posted 5y ago by Liquid‭  ·  last activity 4y ago by System‭

Answer
#4: Attribution notice removed by user avatar System‭ · 2019-12-13T11:56:51Z (over 4 years ago)
Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/45183
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
#3: Attribution notice added by user avatar System‭ · 2019-12-08T11:45:10Z (over 4 years ago)
Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/45183
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
#2: Initial revision by (deleted user) · 2019-12-08T11:45:10Z (over 4 years ago)
I'd use the phonetic spelling, unless you're planning to publish in a country where both Arabic and English are commonplace.

The reason is that it's easier for someone used to the latin alphabeth, like english readers, to read and recognize very unfamiliar words such "alaistirkha". Your audience won't have a clue on how that word is spelled correctly, but that's beyond the point: the point is giving the idea of a foreign language while still preserving readability. The next time _alaistirkha_ appears, some people will recognize the word. The third time most of your audience will.

On the other hand, writing it in Arabic would be certainly more faithful, but you'd just be alienating your audience. There's a good chance that non-arabic readers would have troubles searching for the meaning of that word, unless they can copy-paste it into a search engine. Also, it would be difficult to recognize the word on multiple occurences, since the audience is not used to the alphabeth (the same thing goes for cyrillic, or Asian ideogram-based words).

#1: Imported from external source by user avatar System‭ · 2019-05-15T12:30:24Z (almost 5 years ago)
Original score: 3