Arabic Translations of the Slides: Shukran!

Greetings again. As you might have seen, the AuthorAID Resource Library now contains PowerPoint slides in Arabic, translated from presentations at AuthorAID workshops.

Here’s the story behind these translations. At the 2007 Council of Science Editors annual meeting, I spoke about plans for the AuthorAID website. A postdoctoral fellow from the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) heard my talk, and she gave my name to another NIH postdoc, Rana Al-Hallaq.

At that time, Rana was senior editor of the NIH Fellows editorial board (an all-volunteer editorial service to the NIH community). She invited me to give a presentation to the editorial board, and in winter 2008 I did so.

Rana was very interested in AuthorAID and asked how she could help. I learned that she had a very valuable skill: fluency in Arabic, the native language of many AuthorAID community members. Later, when a core set of AuthorAID presentations was developed, I invited Rana to coordinate translating these presentations into Arabic.

The translations, which now have been posted, are by Abdulraouf Al-Hallaq, professor of computer science at Al Zaytoonah University of Jordan. There are two sets of slides: one solely in Arabic, and one in both Arabic and English. I am grateful to this father-daughter team for its skill and hard work. Shukran! (Thank you!)

I know that many Arabic-speaking and other members of the AuthorAID community are now observing Ramadan. To those of you doing so: Ramadan Mubarak! And to everyone in the AuthorAID community: May you have a good week.