English is distinguished from other languages by being the world's primary language today. It is the mother tongue of Great Britain, America, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada, and the second official language for African countries like Nigeria and Zambia, and Asian countries like India and Singapore. Even where it is neither, it receives special attention as a foreign language in education, media, and international relations, as is the case in our Arab world. Since the Arabic library lacks a selection of literature from these three spheres, the series "Journeys Through Translated Stories" comes to fill some of this gap. It presents short stories from Asia, Africa, Europe, America, the Caribbean, and Oceania. The translated stories are distributed across two books: the first includes monolingual worlds (Before Babylon), and the second features characters moving within a multilingual framework (After Babylon). This distribution is ultimately procedural. Translator Khalid Al Balushi starts from the premise that a person, whether monolingual or multilingual, remains an alienated exile wherever and however they may be. The source of our alienation is our humanity; we are, in his view, souls that are not consistent or uniform. However, we have no way to congregate unless our meaning aligns with the meaning of others. When this happens, names, locations, and roles emerge, followed by the endeavor to adapt our souls according to what is agreed upon. This human paradox involves psychological and ethical implications that the translated stories reveal artistically, and the translator-writer seeks to present them for discussion in a third critical book of the series (Demolishing the Tower of Babel).

• Author: A Group of Authors, Translation: Dr. Khalid Al Balushi
• Publisher: Alan Publishers and Distributors
• Year of Publication: 2020
• Edition: 1
• Number of Pages: 240
• Dimensions (cm): 14.5 × 21
• Weight (g): 290
• ISBN: 978-99969-3-383-7