I trained as a civil engineer and worked in the field for a time before I moved to language. Nothing from those years was wasted; my way of working came out of them — a text built on a system, not on a mood.

Carrying a text from one language into another takes more than knowing both. It takes grasping the writer’s intent, not only the sentence — telling the detail placed on purpose from the one that slipped through. For years I took that kind of sensitivity for a weakness. It turned out to be the whole trade.

My work on a text begins with an analytical read, then a glossary and a style guide, then review in stages — so that voice, tone and rhythm arrive unaltered. Five years, hundreds of projects, more than ten million words carried between Arabic and English.

A good deal of that work went out without my name on it, and that was a choice. I wanted to know the market from the inside: how a publisher thinks, where a text stumbles, what makes one manuscript accepted and another returned. I learned more in those years than anywhere else, I enjoyed them, and I still work that way when a project calls for it. But what I write under my own name has a place now, and this is it.

I am not here to prove anything to anyone. I learned late that an insult isn’t answered in kind — the best answer to it is work that carries a lesson and outlasts the one who made it. To choose the good work because it is good, not because anyone is watching.

Hikayat is where that begins: stories I write and publish here, one episode at a time.