Thursday, June 11, 2009

Letter to the Readers

First of all, I would like to thank all of you for your kind emails and generous donations, both of which help support this site and have driven it to be the largest original source of Arabic song lyrics on the web. Thanks to your participation, arabicmusictranslation.com has far exceeded my expectations from when I began the blog 3 years ago

Second of all, I would like to apologize for not responding to thousands of your emails and your requests over the past year. I was living in Syria where internet access is limited and slow, and the volume was simply overwhelming. In addition to this, working on the site was extremely difficult because youtube.com is currently banned by the Syrian government, and I was very disappointed by the amount of progress made on translations in the past year.

This being said, the year in Syria allowed me to greatly improve my Arabic skills, as well accumulate much knowledge about Arabic music and culture in general, and thus, the forthcoming year should yield better and more in-depth translations.

In the coming months I will be making a number of changes to the site as follows. First and foremost, I will continue to increase the volume of translation available, drawing heavily from your requests. In addition, I will begin revising and correcting many of the most egregious errors in previous translations to provide greater accuracy. In future posts, I will be utilizing a different translation strategy that provides less literal but more natural-sounding English translations, and will add commentary where explanation is necessary. This way, the readers should better understand the songs both as they should sound in English and how they should be understood in Arabic. Another vital addition to the site will be more useful background information on artists and Arabic music in general, and more helpful commentary and analysis provided by me, so that the site will be not just a lyrics site, but increasingly a source of intelligent information about Arabic music and language. To assist in this process, we will continue to accept donations, however we ask that if you are hoping to donate in compensation for a specific service rendered, please do not send donations before I have agreed to do the translation and have completed it, and please send such requests by email, chrisgratien@gmail.com, rather than using the typical request form.

If any of you have suggestions as to how we can improve the site in addition to what I have just stated, please comment here on this post or send and email, and, as always, please use the comment boxes to post corrections or suggest better alternative translations where you see fit. This is a major source of new information for me and a great service to me and the readers.

Thanks again to all, I look forward to resuming work on the blog and handling your continued questions and requests

Chris
arabicmusictranslation.com

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