أمَّا بَعْدُ :- : صِيغَةٌ تُسْتَخْدَمُ فِي بِدَايَةِ الرَّسَائِل بَعْدَ التَّحِيَّةِ بِمَعْنَى الآنَ

لشرح هذه العبارة بالكامل يرجى الرجوع إلى الشرح في الرابط التالي للزميل فؤاد

http://www.proz.com/kudoz/arabic_to_english/poetry_literatur...

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Note added at 19 mins (2015-08-27 13:09:36 GMT)
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Note added at 20 mins (2015-08-27 13:11:13 GMT)
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بعضًا من شرح الزميل فؤاد
This question was posted a long time ago. You may want to consult the archives.

Words such as أما بعد are evocative of an era when language was mostly a spoken phenomenon, even when it was actually written. Even in its written form, Classical Arabic had man of the characteristics of oral delivery. That is one reason Arabic writings are full of the conjunction "and."

In later developments in European writing, punctuation marks acquired many important functions, replacing words and changing the way we write and even (ironically), the way we speak. Modern Standard Arabic has adopted many of these new conventions, albeit not consistently.

The expression أما بعد is a segmentation tool. It simply serves to announce that the preceding part was a preamble, and what was to follow was to be the body of the message. Today, when we write anything strucured in this manner, we simply stop with an appropriate punctuation (comma, colon, or period, depending on convention), then we start a new paragraph.

If we translating into English, and we want to impart the flavor of the old style, we can use an expression that serves to announce the body of the message, such as:

"Now, ..."
"Having said so, ..."
"With that in mind, ..."

The choice would depend on the topic and the style.