Fathy Shehatto (asker) Apr 23, 2010:

Yes, It is for a Syrian Readership Thank you all for your your valuable inputs. Ultimately, I could persuade the client to leave the Formulas as they are..

Yes, Nesrin. We can only substitute the structural formulas when compounds are named.

Fuad Yahya Apr 23, 2010:

Is your translation for Syrian readership? How you handle a chemical formula in a translation job depends on where the Arabic text will be read. To my knowledge, the only Arab country where chemical formulas are (or at least were) written in Arabic symbols is Syria. I studied high school chemistry in Saudi Arabian schools in the late 60s. The lessons were all in Arabic, except the formulas (and hence the equations). They were all in Latin (international) symbols. I believe that is the way it has been in all the other Arab countries, except Syria, at least at that time. It is 2010, so thing may have changed.

To translate chemical formulas, you simply replace the Latin symbol for each element with the equivalent Arabic symbol for. Formulas are written right-to-left. Numbers are placed exactly as they are in the Latin formula. For example, water, which is "H2O" (where "2" is a subscript) is written this way:
يد2أ
(where "2" is a Hindi numeral subscript).

Fathy Shehatto (asker) Apr 22, 2010:

Hello Dr. Ola Thank you for your kind response,

really there are 3 methods to name a chemical compound the structural form below is one of them..

Structural form is only to provide as a representation of the molecular structure.

To me, every compound has a chemical names and trade name besides its structural form (i.e. a carbon atom which is bonded to 3 H atoms can be named as CH3 and so on)

Nesrin Apr 22, 2010:

Exactly. Unless you know the name of the compound, you don't translate formulas.

Ali Alsaqqa Apr 22, 2010:

chemical compound this is a chemical compound, no translation is needed.