Reading in Your Own Language

In the old courts and trading posts, a turjuman stood between two languages and carried meaning from one to the other. Both sides trusted him because he belonged entirely to neither. The word travelled with the job: into Turkish, into Italian as dragomanno, into English as dragoman. It always named a person rather than a process.

Most writing never leaves the language it was born in. An essay in Arabic reaches people who read Arabic, an essay in English reaches people who read English, and the two audiences never meet. Machine translation will give you the gist of anything in seconds, and it will usually cost you the reason the piece was worth reading.

This site works the other way round. An article is written once and then translated slowly, and every translation is published as a full article with its own title, address and typography. The Arabic version is not a language setting applied to the English one; it is written to sit on the page as though it had started there.

Underneath, the versions stay one piece of writing, so they share one comment thread. Someone writing in French is answering someone who wrote in Arabic. Some articles stand alone, others belong to a series that adds up to a book over time, and many can be listened to as well as read. Read in whichever language you think in. If yours is missing, it is probably on the list.