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thank you yes uh muhammad
asi please
uh you are muted muhammad can you please
okay and with your mic yes can you hear
me
thank you very much thank you dr hamoda
it is a privilege really as sami said
it's a privilege and honor
to take part in this lecture my name is
mohammed asi
i'm an interpreter staff interpreter at
the united nations
i've had a long career in interpreting
and translation before i became staff
interpreter
my question is about synonyms we all
know that
synonyms is uh
is not something that we can rely on
for uh the uh definition of a synonym
is a word or a phrase that means uh
exactly or
nearly the same as another word
or phrase it's not the same
i uh exist
and i think uh that is uh uh an
erroneous concept that was the base
uh the basis of so many false
interpretation of the quran
i will give examples for ex for example
the word
those are which are very which are
almost identical
but they are different
yeah we have a problem in particular
when
interpreting religious texts so i i
don't think they would use the same word
in english
it may seem that these two words are the
same
for those who have adopted no yes
what is your comment on that i believe
that it is the same thing in english or
french
well i think i may add something else
because
you comment within the same idea uh
a previous uh talk there was a question
raised about
the the difference between nasara and
messi
and how to translate them to english
yes thank you okay so first of all
um i i agree generally with
with that concept that synonyms there's
a reason
why words are different um it is freedom
and liberty are they the same words uh
you know freedom is from the german frey
and and and liberty is from the latin
liberty libertas
so some people make distinctions is work
and labor
different you know some people say labor
is the body and work is
like a manager works but the the factory
worker
is is actually a laborer you know doing
labor these are distinctions
that you get into flipkart a lot of
shepard
is has been lost um and and
as modern people we are far less
specific
in our language
than ancient peoples ancient peoples uh
used words very precisely one of the
things you'll note with children
is they really like to use words
precisely and they actually get upset
when you miss words
use words so for instance i mean i'll
just give an example of my five-year-old
i once told him put on your shoes and he
looked at me said those aren't shoes
they're boots you're right yeah all
right
and because a boot is not a shoe and a
shoe is not a sandal
and yet footwear is footwear so the
concept
is very similar and in that way
language we lose these distinctions
because
of the similarities of the concept so an
example
i mean you're right anzala is to come
down at one time
nesella is tanzeelan it's over a period
of time
those those are nuances of the language
so how do we translate that
you can translate it with a phrase or a
clause
or you could try to find if there is a
word in english and this takes
real work to do to do this well
people ask me oh why don't you translate
the quran and i'm just like
first of all you can't
translate the quran but you cannot
translate the quran and i and i really
and arberry is one of the few scholars
that made that distinction because his
his
quran says an interpretation
because translators ultimately are
interpreting in terms of synonyms
some synonyms are close enough that it's
not a problem it's not going to create
any confusion like freedom and liberty
some people argue that liberty is a
political concept and freedom is just
the general concept of freedom you can
make those distinctions but they tend to
work
um as as give me liberty or give me
death give me freedom or give me death i
mean those guys that works
both of those work liberty sounds a
little nicer maybe it's a higher
grander style so but i agree with you
you know there's in
in fajrads you know in the quran when
allah says in fajr
ethnic you know and then in vegas
is to come out flowing in vegeta is to
begin flowing and then diminish
and if you get into the commentaries
they say that
before their sinfulness there was an
empty job but after their sinfulness
there was an
indigest so these are these are very
subtle distinctions
in in arabic for instance om the word
in arabic is is not shout and it's not
uh you know kabila om
is specifically the patrilineal
uh aspect of of of somebody's lineage
so your home are your fathers and and
and the arabs are patrilineal in that
way there are
there are some matriarchal or
matrilineal societies but not many
so so so the arabs
and those are his home so in the hadith
the prophet saws
as hellfina and they said fulan
like he wasn't from the poem and the
prophet said
ibn an ukt minal om so he was indicating
that
there's still a wallah even though the
the word
home is not appropriate there's a wala
so he's saying men of little bayan
i know we can trust him and and so
in the quran in surat when allah
subhanahu wa ta'ala says
isa all the prophets said ya tommy but
when isa
speaks to bani israel he says
because they're not his phone because
he's not in the patrilineal
line and that's why in surat al hujarat
in 49 when allah says
he says
because the nisa are not the on so allah
distinguishes between
om and nisa those are difficult things
to translate
it's properly translated by our berry as
table
spread
like it is another thing it's a
table spread which is table it is food
with
a table with food on it no if it doesn't
have food it's called a huan
because it's anybody
also if you look at the which are very
interesting
like in in when allah says
so asa is biru
it it's from the so it means both
that i how do you translate that because
i think it's indicating that is always
bad and
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foreign
you know how would you translate rahim
here you know
it's womb is not correct because
it's actually the matrix which if you
look in the latin
meaning of matrix it's womb from the
other so
mute
yeah so those you know these are
subtleties i mean language is very
subtle
for for those of you who um
who are working with english i would
highly recommend
two books one of them is the scribner
bantam
english dictionary and i'll tell you why
if you go into this dictionary um they
will give you
all the the ficolora so for instance
feeling
adjective possessing or showing great
sensibility
easily affected sympathetic noun
any of the cutaneous senses commonly
called touch
by which contact pressure temperature
and pain are perceived
four act of perceiving or state of one
who perceives
by touch five sensation received
otherwise than through sight hearing
taste or smell
six emotion seven
power to experience sympathy tenderness
or the like
eight belief or conviction nine
animating spirit
as in a work of art which calls forth an
emotional response
10 feelings plural sensitiveness or
susceptibility
feelingly adverb synonyms now look at
the synonyms
sense sensation sensitiveness
sensibility success susceptibility
emotion sentiment passion
now discrimination so they go into
discrimination
feeling is a general term for the
experience of senses
and may include aspects of perception
other than those derived from sight
hearing smell or taste
the means of awareness through bodily
perceptions are called the senses
the power of these senses regarded
singly
as distinguished from the intellect our
will is called sense
sensation is the physical feeling
resulting from the operation of the
senses
we have sensations of chill creepiness
deafness dizziness and the light
sensibility popularly is the quick and
acute capacity
for feeling of any kind sensibility
so it when you look at jane austen's
sense and sensibility
she sensibility is marianne because it's
the quick and acute capacity for feeling
eleanor is the sense
right which which is is is is is uh is
the power
of perception
so anyway he goes on my point is
absolutely incredible
work into these really fun stations that
have been long
on modern people
so this book is a wonderful resource
unfortunately it's out of print but you
can still get used copies
on online it's called funk and wagnall's
standard handbook of synonyms
antonyms and prepositions so if you look
at
you know that it's a very nice it has
this book you know i love this book so
it'll have like um
a word like disease and then it'll give
you
all of the words that are similar
affection ailment complaint disorder
distemper illness and disposition
infirmity malady but then it goes into
the differences
so this is really fit aloha and and
and unfortunately these things are lost
but for those of us who love
language and want to keep these
distinctions alive and recognize the
incredible importance
of these distinctions and i really feel
like a translator that's committed
to their craft is in a lifelong process
of mastering
these distinctions thank you sheikh
thank you
mohamed asi for the questions now i give
the floor to
el bernalli where is please
i have comment regarding the words you
gave maker and
cade actually you are completely right
when you said that
they are similar but not synonyms you
said also that
the word cade can't stand by itself and
naked
while the world maker needs a
preposition
the word macro does not necessarily need
a preposition it can also stand by
itself
you know that's true that's true but
generally the quran uses it with
preposition
yes it has it has been said in the quran
the as you can see the word
but there it's intransitive
you see you know it it's intransitive
there
so as a transitive verb in order for it
to take an object it needs a
opposition so there's a big difference
thank you okay
i think the point is clear well thank
you neder
please
thank you very much it's such an honor
to take
part in this picture uh my intervention
is just
a small tactic let's say on your
statement that
quran cannot be true translated
so the dichotomy of trans translability
and translability
uh because in arabic words
not only words provide for ambiguity and
a multiplicity of meaning
or interpretations but also the same
word
or the same sentence can be problematic
like in the verse
so the haraka as well as
clear matter uh
and any change can
extremely flip the meaning
also in the verse
uh there are uh four
acts of speech in this very sentence
so uh if we translate it
maybe we can not only distort the
meaning
but maybe we cannot deliver the message
in the same
eloquent style right thank you
thank you very much yeah no good i i
talking about uh
very problematic uh as all of you know
in reading arabic
you you start a sentence and and you
think it's active but then you get to
something you realize the verb was
passive um that happens a lot in arabic
um and so and then you have uh
you know you have things like um you
know
both of them are in arabic
and and they are nuanced in in that
meaning um
for instance
they're both actually part of the quran
so which one do you use and which one do
you translate or do you translate both
uh if you look at for instance uh that
the prophet saws
says that he wasn't uh he he his heart
in
the beginning so in wash
his heart tim with a kasra in
helps his heart with a father
khatam means a seal it's a ism in
arabic means the last if you look at the
the padilla in pakistan that whole
movement
is based on not knowing the quran
because they
argued that the prophet was khatam and
not the last
because didn't know the
despite the fact that he was a scholar
you know he memorized the quran
and then also like yeah is only with
knowledge you can't say al-qaeda
the only ones that truly have this
hashia
are the ulama because you can't have
kasha without the ill
thank you hola
please yes thank you uh
doctors both doctors for this fruitful
denoting the idea of the the uh
the idea of jose regarding the sign the
signifier and the signified
being the sign the actual object and the
signifier the letters or the sounds
and that comes into my mind or the
reader's mind
and the signified which is the in the
image that came
into the mind so you ended up saying
that the sign is
is the meaning and the signifier is the
language
and uh the signified it's which is which
is going to be the interpreting
am i right this the signified
is is the the the actual concept in your
mind
not the sign yes yes you're right yes
yes the sign is the vehicle by which
you're
conveying it yes
right so we are on the field of the
signifier which is the language
yeah so and then you uh
you started to to um to
to tell us the process while we are
translating not
interpreting translating uh um a kind of
a verse
uh from the quran following it into
according to the lexical level uh and
then we are going to
further more to the morphological level
syntactic 11 at the semantical level
and so on so uh and also i would like to
uh
uh jani i would like to to also add the
idea of
uh karate
i'm translating an a or a verse it's
gonna be half
an alpha or uh any other one or
uh i have to stick to the people uh
could i add that they are uh uh
following
not just hafsa and awesome and i also
would like to ask
about the um how did you manage
to interpret uh not to translate in your
own uh
uh conference uh confronting uh that
before how did you handle that
translating verses of quran interpreting
it i'm sorry not translating it
because you know interpretation uh it
doesn't have
much time to to to make it in
calculation and tracing the actual
meaning of the lexical
uh items and morphological items and so
on
right and also i would like to add
something regarding the words of anzella
and nozzle i have surgery uh
while we were together and i found that
anzala means
uh according to that um am i resorting
to
relative clauses uh to to to
to differentiate between these slight
differences between these
synonyms or let us say different
meanings and words
uh am i doing kind of long sentences
yes am i going to resort to that there
was a lot
in there um thank you thank you
yeah i mean i would say just on a few
things because uh
the the um personally translating the
quran is very
problematic for me uh i you know may
allah forgive
us it's it's his book and and when when
you're
when you're in a lecture or and you're
translating for somebody who's quoting
eyes of quran
you know i think just to convey the
meaning
is the best that you can do um and
and uh you know like i said uh
you know may allah forgive us uh for any
mistakes that we make
on that uh in terms of you know
uh the the are very important
um and and and there are
you know that for instance uh uh allah
says
in the 22nd surah in hajj
allah
so one puts it in the active and the
other puts it in the passive
um and both meanings are sound
you know permission is granted to those
who are fighting in other words minute
muslim means
those who have been aggressed upon that
they they're they have a license to
defend themselves so
though those you know i mean i i i think
people who translate the quran have to
be aware of the
and that's a place for footnotes um
uh but in terms of in tunis you
recite
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was in his dialect so it's in the it's
in the quraishi dialect
and and imam malik preferred it over all
the other he preferred nephi
so did um he actually malik considered
sunnah and ahmed muhammad was
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you know and it's it's uh it's it became
popular
because um the abbasids adopted it you
know the
and was of awesome
so it became very popular but is a
beautiful
it's it's more difficult it's the one i
use um
it's more difficult to learn the medus
are are longer also because the
the uh you know the you have the six
harder cuts
um so if you're reciting it it's
it it takes longer to recite it than it
does uh
house you know so i i would just say
that um
iran is just something you you with fear
and trouble
nation you should have a humility with
the quran
and one of the things that the people of
hadith
say is that you always when you quote a
hadith and i forget to do this but you
really
should do it uh you end it by saying oh
come
on you
is factual it's as solid as any ayah in
the quran
so you know and i heard one of them
was a great scholar from mauritania felt
that
that anybody who has land in
transmitting these might fall in uh
because uh you're the prophet never
had lan so it's like and
kind of in arabic is very interesting
because
when the muhammad it doesn't necessarily
mean that he was intentionally a liar
what it meant is that he just
transmitted everything he heard
without ascertaining because of the
hadith that it's enough to call a man a
liar who transmits everything he hears
so if you're not if there's no tether
and
and to help on what's being said then
you can end up being a liar
yes thank you sheikh for these very
insightful explanations
on language and synonyms and so on
but i'm going to ask a question about uh
the context
not the verbal and the strict context of
words synonymy
exactly the broader context
and the importance of contextualization
and this is one tool in the hands of
translators they cannot transmit a
message
or convey something without
contextualizing it
in the first place and here
i'm not speaking about the sacred text
or the hadith but even
any classical text like
the text or the book by imam al-ghazali
and
i think in one of your books i think it
is the
vision of islam something like that you
said that it is very dangerous
to read a book by imam al-ghazali and
not understand that
imam al-ghazali was working in sixth
sixth century eastern islam
you are fortunate to know
sheikh binbaya to know you know him and
and you can
engage in a discussion with him to infer
the right
meaning from his uh what he has
said and the interpretation but
you cannot engage in a dialogue with uh
imam al-ghazali
because he lived in a different era
so and you cannot invoke the elements of
context
properly what to do in this case to be
faithful
to the philosophy of
a great writer like
okay well first of all i'd say you're
you're talking about context in two
different ways
and so in in the first sense everything
is embedded uh you know words are
embedded
in a context like for instance the
context of this discussion
is about me
speaking with a group of translators
about my own experiences in translating
and maybe helping
these students uh navigate something
that at my age now i've been navigating
for a long time and i can pass
so that's the context of this discussion
and and
and and that's why the subjects that
we're talking about
are contextualized in the context of
this
subject but now you're also talking
about historical context
so so language is embedded in the
context with which
it it emerges so for instance
uh in surat which comes after al-anfal
and some of the unum collapsed the two
together so there's no basmata
but others said no the basmallah is
absent because of the context
of the surah that it wasn't appropriate
because in belarus they say
that
it should correspond to the the context
that's literally what it means
and so so it's not appropriate in the
context
of the opening of toba to have bismillah
because it's talking about basically
warfare so
uh that that's an example of
context embedded uh language in context
historical context is a completely other
problem
and that is and and where we have to
differentiate
and and as philosophically as an
essentialist
i would argue that ghazali
is a man for all times in many things
and in some things he's a man for his
time
so women that read sometimes find
ouches in ghazali's writings because
sometimes he's he's really seems like
he's a man of his time
and in the way he talks about women
um but does that mean we throw him out
because he has some statements that in
today's
sensibilities would be considered sexist
you know i would argue that so sorry can
you give us an example on
on ghazali's view to to women
well if you read babanyika if you read
for instance
you know that uh you know things like um
you know making the remark that uh
you know a baron a sejada
in the corner of your house is better
than sleeping with a barren wife
i mean that's a pretty
it you know that's a that's a harsh
statement um
even though it's attributed to uh to uh
one of the sahaba i won't mention the
name but the point
the point of that statement is is that
abandon you know is is
that a lot of the olia saw
sexuality as as uh as procreation that
like the catholics that you went with
the nia of
procreation even audrey for instance
saw it as a very highly spiritual thing
and so
he would say with the right intention
sleeping with your spouse is actually an
act of ibadah
so you know i'm just using that as an
you asked for an example so
excuse me for the the explicit nature of
the example but
um you know and other things i mean you
just find things that
that are just i think uh
you know they're they're just a little
difficult but overall
he's he's universal far more than he is
particular to his time and place and in
that way
i think his words can be communicated
over time and this is why
you can take a work like uh like the the
20th chapter
of the on the prophet's fallation that
work is
is for all time and we can translate it
and
and we know what those words mean or or
we can
we can take kitab and
and that's speaking to us today or
kasura
or steven mode the 40th book i mean
i think that historical context is
important to understand
but we also have to recognize much of
what our islamic tradition
uh is grappling with our universals that
are true for every time and place
and so in some ways you know there if
you look at him even tamiya
even tamiya was living at a time when
the muslim world was under
siege so he has a siege mentality
his his mentality is very different from
somebody who
is living at a time when the muslims
were uh
in the full height of their power um
if you look for instance a lot of the
things about christians and jews in our
books
were said at a time when the christians
and jews
were completely uh in a state of
subjugation to to the muslims and so
they didn't feel any need to uh hide
their feelings
about this that or the other we're
living in a time which is
is the absolute opposite and so it's
important
that you know that we follow closer to
the earlier
tradition of just the prophet sam was
very conciliatory
um he did not offend people he did not
want to offend people but when people
are in power they tend to forget those
things
and so there's a lot of things in our
tradition that are very
ugly and um and they need to be
contextualized in their historical truth
i'll give you one example
if you look at the hadith in sahih
bukhari that
a the prophet stood for the jew uh
who was being taken to his field and
they said that it's a yahood
he said nafsa isn't it a soul
in the country and you can see this
a great scholar in the commentary some
of the ulama said
he was standing because of the foulness
of the stench
like how do you get that interpretation
out of that
you get it because of the
particularities of the time
you know they really had a low opinion
of other religions and of other peoples
that i don't think is the spirit of
islam allah says
let us
we have made every ummah think what that
what they're doing is good
like allah says he did that so
just like don't curse the idols of other
like hindu we're not supposed to curse
their idols
because we want to reach people and
share and
if you don't show respect for other
people why should they show respect for
you
yeah thank you sheikh uh i'm aware of
time now it is
almost five uh to uh
nine hour time and five to one pm your
time
i'm not uh sure if we can
add some a few minutes ten minutes
perhaps because i can see
so many requests on the floor so
uh would you accommodate ten or more
you very much uh
professor mohammed masoor you have the
floor please
i think you are muted professor muhammad
uh yes can you hear me now we can yes
can you hear me now
we can hear you quite well yes okay fine
okay
thanks for this uh opportunity dr salvi
and good evening to our speaker
and to the attendees i'd like also to
thank the speaker for highlighting the
the fact that poetry is a language
charged to the maximum
and also thanks for insisting on nuances
as related to prepositions i know
someone who wrote a
full phd dissertation on the meaning of
woe
uh why would uh
in in the language and
about synonymy also this is a this is an
important issue
maybe in in in the
you have synonymy but i don't think you
have synonymy
in three verse in free verse a poet
would
not sacrifice the meaning
for just a word that rhymes
and i have you know read this poetry and
i have discussed it
and i don't see in free verse
uh you know that pursuit of the
musical word or the word that rhymes at
the cost of
of the precise meaning
so maybe poetry is the place to start
to really know more about nuances of
meaning
as you said somebody called this in a
previous presentation as
full now to my query
i once started a project in which i was
uh
trying to you know show
the favor that
uh speakers of the language owe
to translated works that is
there are verses of the quran
i i you know i went to a quranic school
and i
really got trained uh fully trained i
believe
in in a quranic school but still there
are passages in the text
which i can grasp better in translation
that is in the english language not only
because those people
mastered the language but also because
they read
different exigencies of the of the text
and and and and kind of add different
kind of ethics
now my query is
in relation to
instances in the text where we have
sahib
and other instances where we have imra
and then instances where we find nissa
as a generic term any any any thoughts
on this
professor so yeah i
i think um the the great just on the
poetry
i think that the truly great masters of
poetry
would never arabic is so vast in its
vocabulary
that they would never have to
lose the meaning in search of uh of a
rhyming
word or so i mean there's that what
they're working with the the the corpus
the body
of of uh of language that they're
working with
is it's amazing i mean arabic has more
vocabulary than any other
language in the world so
and and as you know the great poets use
words that
we've never heard of we have to look
them up and one of the things i love
about the humility
of arab texts is that they will often um
explain the words at the bottom i wish i
wish english texts did that because
when you read really difficult writers
they often use words that you have to
look up
whereas the arabs put them down at the
bottom because they know
that this is a fast language and not
everybody has that vocabulary
in terms of of uh the only woman
mentioned in the quran is maryam
all of the other there's no other woman
mentioned by name in the quran
you know the imra you know
uh so luke's wife we don't know the
names we don't know imato aziz
which is uh some say it's you know
in in in the top seers uh the reason
that mufasa don't give
is that um they say that
for the arab it was bad adam to mention
a woman by name who was not your
sahiba or your own and because of
maryam's special
with allah she is law
and one of the very intriguing aspects
of in arabic
is that and
is an incredible subject
but isa is is
and if you look it ha it it doesn't drop
the alif
in the rasam so that it's actually
so isa is it's it's really a bit
a battle right it's not an a
it's like isa even um like
jesus the son of maryam as like a
it's like he's not just isa
he's the son of maryam and so
she has that special makaam that she's
the only one mentioned
in terms of the the other words i mean
nissa is
is is a is a generic uh plural you know
and arabic i mean there's a debate is
there in santa
in santa tune fatanitum you know they
they are
talk about that insane is more like
mensch in uh in german you know it's the
human being
um and and and arabs tend to
arabic when it when there's no ambiguity
it uses
the masculine form for the feminine so
for instance
a woman who's pregnant she's the only
one that can get pregnant she's
not called hamilton she's hammond and
which proves to you
that is arabic is not a sexist language
in that way
that it's it's it it's only using
uh you know the the the the the
masculine to
include both but when it when there's no
ambiguity it uses the masculine for the
feminine
even though it's a effect and sometimes
it uses the feminine for the masculine
you know like chimps or or uh
and on and on so so um i think
uh those nuances are are are
very often brought out in some of the
great commentators
uh of the quran um one if you're
interested in a really
interesting modern uh rhetorical i mean
kashaf is the is the great source for a
lot of this
but a samurai is who's an iraqi scholar
who wrote
a tapsir albayani um is a
really interesting four volumes but he
really gets into
the nuances of the of the different
words
uh in arabic yeah thank you chef we are
going to take a last
question and yeah
you are uh the luckiest to be the
last to ask question to so
um i i'm seeing the names are there is
this a multinational because
it seems like egyptian names yes yes
my name is in this context i'm
and it's not a question in fact i'm very
i'm very excited
and it's an honor really to to be able
to listen to you
uh virtually thank you hamuda thank you
sheikh
jazakallahu in fact
i'll give you a very brief background
i'm born in saudi arabia
i used to offer the quran uh
i'm graduate of al-azhar university and
i have it foreign
and regardless of that my first job
opportunity was
islamic it was the highest
highest institute and and i was like no
way
i'm scared i can't i cannot
it's not me guys i'm running away of
this civil
service and you know i need to we have
to have a civil serve
to be civil servants as a kind of
let's say security and i rejected that i
escaped it after
almost 15 years i was invited to
interpret
in a conference of adien
it was a terrifying experience
and i'm i was like no way this is one of
the most difficult fields i've ever
can deal with and that's why i decided
guys you are heroes
and i will never be able to do what you
do the more you talk like i said
that i'm ignorant guys i'm ignorant
alhamdulillah
that i'm just an interpreter
alhamdulillah
thank you so much
perhaps i will be ending this talk in
arabic
by way of summarizing in a couple of
minutes
what has been discussed in this very
insightful
and memorable uh discussion with the
prominent
scholar sheikh
you are really you've taken us
into a journey
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um
um
uh
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um
the thing i'm most proud of in terms of
translation
is uh the prayer of the oppressed
and this took me a really long time
because
i i took a poem that was in the regis
meter
and i put it in a
hexameter which is very similar
to the regis meter so
if you look at it they're both metered
so if you say yeah
o you whose mercy is a refuge for all
those
in dire need who flee to you
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whose pardon is so near you answer all
in need they know that you do here
we beg for your relief redeemer of the
week
you are enough for us both humble then
so meek
so uh that's that's what i'm most proud
of in my
translation work is
intercultural communications
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foreign
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you