(the) poor countries, (the) rich regions

neb   Mon Nov 19, 2007 10:45 am GMT
Hello :)

I'm translating an economic text from my native Polish to English. There is a distinction between poor and rich countries, but the text doesn't mention specific names. Now, when 'poor countries' or 'rich countries' appear for the first time, I write these phrases without an article. But these expressions keep appearing again and again, so I refer to them as 'the rich countries' and 'the poor countries' (even though I don't know which specific countries the author means).

Please, use your native speakers' intuition and tell me if this is OK :)
There are no articles in Polish and that's why they're still troublesome for me.

There are also phrases like 'rich regions' or 'poor parts of the world'; is it OK if I write them with 'the', since they are synonymous with 'rich countries' and 'poor countries'?

Thanks very much :)
Guest   Mon Nov 19, 2007 12:35 pm GMT
I think we'd have to see the text in question (or at least snippets of it) before we could make valid recommendations.