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About the Corpus

Raṣāʾif is a corpus bringing together selected texts from the classical Arabic tradition — in scholarship and in letters — alongside their published English translations, presented sentence by sentence and paragraph by paragraph in a parallel table. It is built for researchers in Arabic language, translation studies, and the humanities.

Categories

The corpus is organised into two categories: Scientific Works — jurisprudence, medicine, biography, and the sciences — and Literary Works — artistic prose and the maqāmāt. Further texts will be added as the corpus grows.

How texts are aligned

Each Arabic unit is set beside its English translation equivalent. The alignment is manual: every pair has been verified to confirm genuine correspondence between original and translation, not merely positional matching. The gold dot (●) visible between each row in the parallel table marks a verified pair.

How search works

Enter a word and every sentence in the corpus that contains it — or any of its derived forms — is returned. With morphological search enabled, a query for kataba will also return kātib, maktūb, katabtu, since they share the same root. Results are ordered by specificity: sentences where the term is most distinctive and closely clustered come first.

Sources & provenance

AuthorTitle Arabic editionEnglish translation Category
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Adding new texts

A converter tool is included in the corpus. Upload a Word or CSV file with two columns — Arabic and English — and the tool extracts the parallel pairs and generates the metadata entry. Upload the two text files to the appropriate folder in the repository, paste the metadata block into corpus/index.json, and the text appears in the corpus.

Open the converter →

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