WATANI International
21 February 2010
Last Thursday Watani International marked the completion of the 9th year since it first went into print.
It’s only fair to admit we’ve come a long way since then. After fully depending on the Arabic version of the mother paper Watani for our journalistic material, we have reached the point where some 80 per cent of the material printed in English is written and reported exclusively for us. Our team strives for excellence in prompt reporting in order to offer our English-speaking readers a vivid vision of what goes on in Egypt, which has been—as per our readers’ request—our prime purpose since we started.
Throughout our 9 years in English language journalism, there has been one problem we were not able to tackle to our full satisfaction. This is the manner of writing Coptic names or words in English. The problem with Coptic words is that they have become adulterated in Arabic, so that the manner of pronunciation of many of them is no longer identical with their original Coptic. So far, we have been writing these words as a transliteration of their current, common Arabicised transliteration. From now on we will be using a new system. We will print Coptic words as a transliteration of their Arabicised version and add, in parenthesis, a transliteration of the original Coptic.
To start with, the date of this issue reads 14 Amshir (Meshir) 1726.
