Arabic to Persian: familiar letters, different sentence relationships
Do not let the shared writing system decide the meaning
Persian and Arabic share many letter shapes and a substantial body of vocabulary, but an Arabic sentence does not become Persian through small spelling substitutions. Read the entire action and identify its participants first. Persian belongs to a different grammatical system, and familiar-looking nouns can make an otherwise incorrect translation appear convincing.
Treat shared vocabulary as a starting point for understanding, not as proof that the same construction works. A formal institutional name may have an established Persian version, while a personal name may simply need to retain its conventional spelling. Decide which kind of expression you are handling before replacing words that happen to look familiar.
Replace Arabic agreement with Persian grammar
Arabic هو and هي distinguish masculine and feminine singular reference. Persian او can represent either when referring to a person. Thus an Arabic sentence identifying a woman does not require a feminine ending throughout the Persian sentence. Persian does not reproduce Arabic noun and adjective gender agreement.
This also means that some information carried by Arabic grammar becomes less explicit in Persian. Retain a person’s name when it is necessary to distinguish two participants, but do not insert unnecessary descriptions merely to imitate every grammatical distinction. The aim is to keep the message clear, not to invent Persian gender forms that do not exist.
Arabic dual morphology needs another kind of conversion. كتابان, “two books,” becomes دو کتاب in an ordinary Persian phrase. Persian expresses the quantity through دو rather than an Arabic dual ending. Check that the exact number survives, especially in a message about a pair of documents or tickets; a general plural would lose useful information.
An Arabic idafa is not a Persian ezafe with the same rules
Arabic باب البيت can be expressed as درِ خانه in Persian, “the door of the house.” The visible kasra in درِ makes the Persian linking sound explicit for this example; everyday writing may leave it unmarked. Persian uses ezafe to connect the noun and its modifier. It does not copy the Arabic definite article ال into an ordinary Persian noun phrase.
When a phrase contains several connected nouns, identify the main noun and each relationship before rewriting it. Persian can use the same linking system with adjectives as well as possessors. Applying Arabic definiteness and agreement rules to that chain can create a hybrid expression that looks learned but does not read naturally as Persian.
Write for a Persian reader rather than an Arabic learner
Choose a consistent written register. Persian has differences between standard writing and informal Iranian speech; a routine Arabic notice should not turn into colloquial Persian by accident. Equally, ordinary correspondence does not need ornate vocabulary simply because Arabic supplied a formal-looking borrowed word.
Persian letters such as پ, چ, ژ, and گ are part of its alphabet and may appear in native words and names. Do not replace them with nearby Arabic letters just to keep the original character inventory. When a recipient needs to search for a name or place, the established Persian spelling is more useful than a mechanically Arabic-looking approximation.
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