George Nicolas El-Hage Ph D

A Companion Book to marHaba II George Nicolas El-Hage Ph D

This book is a companion book to marHaba II. Due to the popular demand from numerous readers and students, especially those who are independent and highly motivated, self-taught learners, I have agreed to publish this book which contains the English translation and transliteration for every one of the 28 lessons in marHaba II. In the transliteration section, although written in Roman letters, I did not observe the protocol of capitalization of words; instead, and as expected, I followed the transliteration code and practice to highlight the different letters of the Arabic alphabet that are listed in the "Legend" and that have no exact equivalent in English. In translating the lessons, I tried to be literal, true to the original meaning, unless the wording totally made no sense in English. In a case like this, I translated the gist of the meaning, the spirit of the content, while providing the individual literal meaning of key words in the vocabulary list of every lesson which is included in the actual textbook. Hence, these English lessons (texts) are here to facilitate the understanding of the original Arabic lessons and should not be treated as independent literary lessons in their own right. I guess the same can be said about the transliterated portion of this book. Furthermore, please note that in dialect, much more than in MSA, popular sayings, idioms, and proverbs are naturally embedded in the colloquial speech and are freely used by the native population because they are closer to people's lives, daily experience, and more expressive of their heartfelt feelings and emotions. In translating such popular expressions, you cannot be literal; instead, the gist and the intended meaning should be conveyed.