: Re: How to write Arabic in dialogue for an English piece? I have a character who is a Syrian refugee to Canada. His first language is Arabic, but he's lived in Canada long enough that he's learned

@Shanna875

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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).

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