كمقدم إيجار يتم خصم نصف القيمة الإيجارية المشار إليها في البند الثالث إلى ان تنفذ

[lena55313]

Hi, everybody
I'm completely puzzled by the sentence from the standard egyptian rent contract (the paper which is sold in paper-shops)
تقاضي الطرف الأول من الطرف الثاني مبلغ وقدره: 1000 جنيهاً كمقدم إيجار يتم خصم نصف القيمة الإيجارية المشار إليها في البند الثالث إلى ان تنفذ بعدها تسدد الأجرة كاملة (يمكن الأتفاق على أى وسيلة لسداد هذا المقدم)
The first part of the sentence I understood as: The first part of the contract demanded from the second part of the contract the sum which is equal to 1000 Le as a prepayment for the rent.
After that the verb يتم comes, and I can't catch what it means, is it Passive or not? What is deducted from what? And where is its subject - مقدم or خصم ?
My guess:
1. The half of the rent payment, mentioned in the point 3, would be deducted from the prepayment untill the full amount of the rent payment would be paid ?
Then the question comes: why they take only half of the rent payment and what would they do with the rest of prepayment sum?
2. 1000 Le - is a deposit and its value is calculated as half of the sum mentioned in the point 3 (1000 = X - 1/2X)?
Thank you in advance

 

[analeeh]

For tamm to be translated as passive it has to come with a مصدر placed in idafa with its logical object. Grammatically its subject here is خَصْمُ (the maSdar of خصم 'deduct').

The phrasing could be clearer - I think a preposition is missing. But what it means is that you make a payment of 1,000 LE (which we can infer is half the monthly rent) when signing the rental contract (as a security deposit, مقدم ايجار), and as a result, the same sum (1,000 LE) will be deducted from the rent you have to pay when rent is actually due.

The first party shall require of the second party a sum of 1000 guineas as a security deposit. Half the value of the rent as given in Article 3 shall be discounted upon subsequent payment of the total rent.

 

[jack_1313]

I believe the standard text can be found here. It reads:

تقاضى المالك من المستأجر مبلغ ... جنيه ( .......... جنيه فقط لا غير) كمقدم إيجار يتم مقابله خصم نصف القيمة الإيجارية المشار إليها في البند 4 إلى أن ينفذ، على أن يتم بعدها تسديد الأجرة كاملة. (يمكن الاتفاق على أي وسيلة أخرى لسداد هذا المقدم)​

In English, it reads:
The landlord has received* from the tenant the sum of ... pounds ( ... pounds only) as a rent advance in exchange for which half the rental value mentioned in Clause 4** shall be deducted until it [i.e. the rent advance] is depleted***. Thereafter, the rent shall be paid in full. (Any other means to pay settle this advance may be agreed upon.)

* Note the past tense.
** Clause 4 covers the periodic rent payments to be paid daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly.
*** The choice of verb here is incorrect. It should be ينفد , i.e. to run out or be depleted, but the authors have written ينفذ, i.e. to pierce or penetrate or to be implemented, depending on vocalization. But the confusion of these two verbs is a very common error and I doubt most people would notice or even know the difference.
More importantly, Lena, check the verb form in your own contract. In the one I linked to, the verb is masculine and the subject is evidently the "rent advance", which makes sense. In the text you posted, the verb is feminine, meaning the subject would be the agreed-upon rent value (i.e. your regular rent payment). This is a major change and I think you (or whoever produced your version) made a mistake in transcription. (The other changes in phrasing between your version and the version I linked to are minor and don't affect the meaning, though the choice to omit punctuation makes your version hard to read.)

As for what it all means, as I understand it, the tenant pays a “rent advance” when first entering the contract. Then, each time rent is due, the tenant only pays half the agreed-upon amount, and the other half comes out of this "rent advance" already in the landlord's possession. Once the “rent advance” is all used up, the tenant pays the full rent each time, as we would expect.

Analeeh, I don't think this is really the same as a security deposit, at least not as we might understand the term (an amount kept in the landlord's possession to cover damages or unpaid rent and then presumably returned to the tenant at the end of the tenancy).

The last part in brackets isn't crystal clear to me. Specifically, how could the two parties agree that the rent advance could be paid by some "other" means when the clause didn't specify how it should be paid, only that it has been paid and what happens with it going forward? In this regard, the version in Lena's post makes more sense to me because it doesn't include the word "other".
Upon re-reading it, I think that وسيلة لسداد هذا المقدم does not mean a means whereby the tenant pays the advance to the landlord but the means whereby the landlord repays it to the tenant. The use of سداد here is perhaps needlessly ambiguous, but I believe the idea is that rather than having the landlord count the advance towards half the rent payment each month until it's depleted, as written in the clause, the landlord and tenant may agree to some other system, such as having the landlord simply return the entire amount at the end the tenancy.

Note: I'm not a lawyer, just a guy on the internet.

 

[lena55313]

Thank you both so much for your replies! My special thanks to Jack for his useful link with the arabic contracts.

Grammatically its subject here is خَصْمُ

I have a new idea and would like your opinion. Could grammatically the الطرف الأول be the subject to the verb يتم? Cause in that case it seems to make sense. The first part of the contract recieved from the second part of the contract the sum 1000Le ...... and he ( the 1st part of the contract) will يتم خصم نصف القيمة الإيجارية carry out (4th form أتمّ) the deduction (from the advance payment) of the half of the quantity which is mentioned in the point 3 , until it (the quantity) is executed (passive تُنْفَذَ )

More importantly, Lena, check the verb form in your own contract.

I really hope there were no typos in the contract because it was an official paper and it had been reproduced and sold in millions of copies)))
By the way, we crossed this point out of the contract, no part of the contract understood what it meant.

 

[analeeh]

I believe the standard text can be found here. It reads:

تقاضى المالك من المستأجر مبلغ ... جنيه ( .......... جنيه فقط لا غير) كمقدم إيجار يتم مقابله خصم نصف القيمة الإيجارية المشار إليها في البند 4 إلى أن ينفذ، على أن يتم بعدها تسديد الأجرة كاملة. (يمكن الاتفاق على أي وسيلة أخرى لسداد هذا المقدم)​

Ahh, with that it becomes much clearer. I was misled by the missing word and also by the very small sum (1000 guineas).​

I have a new idea and would like your opinion. Could grammatically the الطرف الأول be the subject to the verb يتم? Cause in that case it seems to make sense. The first part of the contract recieved from the second part of the contract the sum 1000Le ...... and he ( the 1st part of the contract) will يتم خصم نصف القيمة الإيجارية carry out (4th form أتمّ) the deduction (from the advance payment) of the half of the quantity which is mentioned in the point 3 , until it (the quantity) is executed (passive تُنْفَذَ )

I don't think this can be right. أتمّ isn't really used like this. Jack's reading makes much more sense. تم plus maSdar is a very, very common structure.

 

[jack_1313]

To translate a text like this well, you need to understand a little bit about the situation of the Arabic language as a whole and texts like this one in particular:

Regarding Arabic as a whole, literacy skills are general poor for a range of reasons, such as the diglossia, the complexity of Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) grammar, poor education, and the marginalization of MSA from professional life in favour of other languages. Hence, error-free prose in MSA is rare, even in “official” documents.

Moreover, texts like this one get copied and edited and transcribed and passed around with little regard for accuracy by people who aren’t really competent to produce legal writing in the first place. Variations of your text appear on at least half a dozen internet forums and Facebook pages, each with its own set of unique errors. Whatever store your landlord bought this contract from probably just downloaded one of these many variants. On their part, the landlords who buy and use these texts don’t necessarily care whether they are accurate – they mostly just want a piece of paper with the tenant’s signature.

Facing these facts, we realise that we must approach this text with a tolerance for errors and we may need to find and consult more than one version if certain parts don't make sense.

no party to the contract understood what it meant.

That’s probably because of the issues I mentioned in my earlier post, namely the incorrect gender of the verb تنفذ (which should be ينفد), which implies the wrong subject, and the failure to either separate or properly join the different sentences.

I have a new idea and would like your opinion. Could grammatically the الطرف الأول be the subject to the verb يتم?

Aneeleh was right when he wrote that the subject of يتم is خصم. I’ll try to break down the translation. The clearest version of the Arabic text is the one I originally linked to, but here, I’ll use this version because it more closely resembles yours while correcting the gender issue concerning the verb نفذ (or rather نفد).

بند 4:- تقاضى الطرف الأول من الطرف الثاني مبلغ وقدر ج جنيها كمقدم إيجار يتم خصم نصف القيمة الايجارية المشار إليها في البند الثالث إلى أن ينفذ بكامله بعدها تسدد الأجرة كاملة

Though they are written as one unit, we actually have three independent clauses (see the link in my original post for an example of how they could be properly combined into a single sentence):

تقاضى الطرف الأول من الطرف الثاني مبلغ وقدر ج جنيها كمقدم إيجار
The first party has received from the second party a sum, the amount of which is ... pounds, as a rent advance.
* There are multiple errors here: مبلغ is in the wrong grammatical case (it should be مبلغا – this error also appears in your version), قدر needs a pronoun suffix (قدره), and جنيها repeats the meaning of ج.

يتم خصم نصف القيمة الايجارية المشار إليها في البند الثالث إلى أن ينفذ بكامله
Half the rental value referred to in Clause 3 shall be* deducted until it [the rent advance] runs out fully**.
* يتم خصم is literally more like “is deducted” (most literally: “the deduction ... occurs”), but in English legalese we traditionally use “shall be” for such stipulations.
** Notice that the ه in بكامله again confirms that the subject of the preceding verb should be المقدم, not القيمة الإيجارية.

بعدها تسدد الأجرة كاملة
Thereafter* the rent shall be paid in full.
* I think this should be بعد ذلك because the ها lacks an explicit referent, but a native speaker might chime in and tell me that بعدها is okay, perhaps because a referent could be inferred (فترة ما قبل نفاد المقدم).

Hopefully all that helps you make sense of the clause.