Abdullah

Question and Answer

• What is your name?
  • Abdullah
• Where do you live?
  • Oman
• What made you decide to become a translator or interpreter?
  • Since English language has become a lingua franca, I decided to study English language. At the same time, Arabic is my beloved thus I've taken decision to be become a translator in order to work in both sides.
• List one strength that you think sets you apart from your colleagues.
  • Workaholic
• Name the one thing that you most enjoy in your translating or interpreting career.
  • Searching for connotations
• We all have worked on those not-so-perfect assignments. Write about one such assignment that was not ideal and what you learned from it.
  • It was a military assignment that intended to be translated into Arabic. I faced a lot of military terms and abbreviations that I couldn't stand. I have learned that every field has its own translator.
• If you could go back in time to when you were just starting out as a translator or interpreter, what advice would you give to your younger self?
  • Enrich my vocabulary through reading and be aware of updates.
• Name one resource – such as a phone app, CAT tool, website, and so forth – that you find especially helpful in your translating or interpreting work.
  • Tradox
• What's the best book you've read this year?
  • In other words

National Best Seller

From the best-selling author and Pulitzer Prize winner, a powerful nonfiction debut—an "honest, engaging, and very moving account of a writer searching for herself in words." —Kirkus Reviews (starred)

In Other Words is a revelation. It is at heart a love story—of a long and sometimes difficult courtship, and a passion that verges on obsession: that of a writer for another language. For Jhumpa Lahiri, that love was for Italian, which first captivated and capsized her during a trip to Florence after college. Although Lahiri studied Italian for many years afterward, true mastery always eluded her.

Seeking full immersion, she decides to move to Rome with her family, for "a trial by fire, a sort of baptism" into a new language and world. There, she begins to read, and to write—initially in her journal—solely in Italian. In Other Words, an autobiographical work written in Italian, investigates the process of learning to express oneself in another language, and describes the journey of a writer seeking a new voice.

Presented in a dual-language format, this is a wholly original book about exile, linguistic and otherwise, written with an intensity and clarity not seen since Vladimir Nabokov: a startling act of self-reflection and a provocative exploration of belonging and reinvention.