Translating the internet into Arabic

Guardian, Spread the word: the Iraqis translating the internet into Arabic 

"Just 0.6% of internet content is available in Arabic, despite it being the fourth most common language among internet users. Ideas Beyond Borders (IBB), the organisation behind the House of Wisdom 2.0 translation project, plans to narrow this chasm and democratise access to knowledge for the Arab world."

DotShabaka (شبكة.)

BBC News - DotShabaka top-level internet domain goes live "The first websites ending in شبكة. - pronounced dot shabaka, and meaning web - went online a day ahead of schedule."

Google: Arabic content ranks eighth on the internet

Google: Arabic content ranks eighth on the internet - Al Arabiya News "Arabic is currently ranked the “eighth language in terms of growth and usage on the internet,” a Google spokesperson told Al Arabiya News."

Storify Arabic version

The Next Web, Storify working with Middle Eastern initiative Taghreedat to translate the site into Arabic, 

"Storify has recently announced that it will be working in cooperation with Taghreedat to translate its interface into Arabic."

Arabic on Twitter

Dana Khraiche, Arabic fastest growing language on Twitter: study, 24 Nov 2011. "The Paris-based Semiocast released an analysis on the language shares on Twitter, surveying 5.6 billion public messages gathered between July 1, 2010 and Oct. 31, 2011. ""More than 2 million public messages were posted ever day on Twitter in Arabic, from about 30,000 in July 2010 [out of 5.6 billion tweets]," the study said."

Twitter enables right to left writing

Arab Crunch, Twitter enables right to left writing, 13 Aug 2011

‘Arabizi is destroying the Arabic language’

Just picked up this one up (a little late) via eAraby

Renad Ghanem, ‘Arabizi is destroying the Arabic language’, 19 April 2011

"Most Arab Internet users find this way easier than typing in Arabic. Teachers fear that this will weaken their Arabic language ability or even replace the language in the future. Arabic professional professors from the Arab world consider it a war against the Arabic language to make it disappear in the long run."

Other opinions are also presented in the article.

2nd edition of Arab Media Outlook

bikyamasr.com, New report looks at digital media in Arab world, 10 Mar 2011"A report detailed in a press release on Sunday said that digital media in the Arab world will continue to move forward as a result of the youth in the region. According to the Arab Media Outlook report published by the Dubai Press Club, North Africa is leading the digital move toward news and media."

Here's the report: Dubai Press Club & PWC's 2nd edition of Arab Media Outlook [pdf]. It runs to a couple of hundred pages, so needless to say I haven't read it yet!

alyaban.net

As I'm presently in Japan, I've been finding out a little more about resources useful to readers to this blog. One in particular is alyaban.net. This is a project promoting news from a Japanese perspective. It is linked to the Sasakawa Middle East Islam Fund. The news and commentaries are regularly updated, and can be obtained via RSS.

Twitter plans Arabic website

David George-Cosh, The National, Twitter plans Arabic website, 17 Nov 2010 "To keep up with the momentum of Twitter's growth and to help it generate more advertising revenue, the website plans to translate its service into Arabic, said Biz Stone, the creative director of Twitter and one of the website's three founders."

Makes sense, business wise. Research wise, yet another channel to monitor...

Majaliss vol. 4

Majalis: CD cover 

UNESCO, UNESCO Digital Library Majaliss continues to expand, 11 Nov 2010 "UNESCO's Rabat Office launches the fourth Volume of Majaliss, the Digital Library of classical Arabic literature. Accessible online and on CD-ROM, Majaliss offers free access to hundreds of books in the public domain, thus illustrating the innovative use of ICT for learning."

"Arab Women in the Face of Challenges of the Information Society"

AICTO, Hannan Taha, globalarabnetwork.com, Tunisia Hosts Conference on Arab Women and Information Society, 27 Sep 2010 "The Conference, held by the Arab Information and Communication Technologies Organisation (AICTO), aims to thoroughly look at means that would help reinforce equality between men and women, and assist Arab women, notably through the multiple uses of information and communication technologies (ICTs), to fully play their role in stimulating their countries' development processes and in developing a lasting information society."

This sounds like a useful conference, so it will be helpful to monitor the findings. Hopefully, we can see some blogging from it ... More information can be found here:  Arab Information and Communication Technologies Organisation

The programme is here [pdf]

eKayf

ArabCrunch, eKayf: The Arabic eHow that We Need, 16 Aug 2010 "Low quality English content might be a true case for eHow, but for the Arabic Internet, there is no content to start with. Thats is why a startup like eKayf which is a copy of eHow but in Arabic is very useful, at least there is now some Arabic content that has some editor behind it rather than content coming from Forums as 90% of that content has no real value, the prof is that most of the time google returns wrong results for many Arabic keywords."

Check it out foryourself: eKayf

Useful info there, and a user-friendly format.

"The New Arab Cyberscape: Redefining Boundaries and Reconstructing Public Spheres"

digitalislam.eu, The New Arab Cyberscape: Redefining Boundaries and Reconstructing Public Spheres "The literature review chapter "The New Arab Cyberscape: Redefining Boundaries and Reconstructing Public Spheres" co-authored by Sahar Khamis and Vit Sisler has been recently published in Communication Yearbook 34 edited by Charles T. Salmon and published by Routledge."

d1g.com

David George-Cosh, The National, Jordan portal to dig into Arabic social networking, 22 June 2010 "A Jordanian web portal is planning to tap into the social networking phenomenon by giving its users the tools to create their own version of Facebook.

"The move by d1g.com is designed to boost the amount of Arabic content online. It is estimated that only 1 per cent of all online content is in Arabic, despite there being about 300 million native speakers around the world."

According to my screenshot, cats would appear to be prominent on the mind of d1g.com users today:

Bookmarking tools

Mohamed Marwen Meddah, startuparabia.com, Revisiting Arabic Social Bookmarking And Content Discovery, June 23, 2010, "A bit over two years ago, I wrote a post about the Arab social bookmarking services out there, listing the existing options, how good they looked and how well they seemed to be doing, identifying the top ones at that time.

"If anyone were to pull up that same list today and go check on each one of the sites, they’d find that some have shut down, others have become useless and spam ridden, some others have become pretty much inactive, and only one or two are still holding on. What’s clear though is that these social bookmarking services never caught on with Arab web users, and never achieved their founders’ initial dreams for them."

Useful overview of Arabic tools.

First Arab Bloggers Conference

Ahmed Shabaan, khaleejtimes.com, Arab bloggers discuss freedom, abuse of platform "Arab bloggers have helped spread Arabic content on the Internet and attracted millions of surfers in the region, according to the First Arab Bloggers Conference which kicked off on Tuesday in Ajman.

"“Not only have Arab blogs attracted some 60 million Arab web surfers, but also ranked Arabic language up to the sixth position among all active languages on the world wide web,” Saudi blogger Mohammed Badwi told the audience of the first session titled ‘Press and Media’."

ICANN and business

David George-Cosh, The National, Arabic language makes the internet its domain, 6 May 2010 " ...Dubizzle, an online classified advertisement website that receives more than 33 million page views a month, said it would have its entire website translated into Arabic as early as next month.

"JC Butler, the co-founder and managing director of Dubizzle, said the company had spent the past nine months building several features that would allow advertisements to be automatically cross-listed in English and Arabic."

See Dubizzle

Arabic net

BBC News, 'Historic' day as first non-Latin web addresses go live, 6 May 2010 "Arab nations are leading a "historic" charge to make the world wide web live up to its name.

"Net regulator Icann has switched on a system that allows full web addresses that contain no Latin characters."

Also see ICANN blog, First IDN ccTLDs now available "Today the first three production non-Latin top-level domains were placed in the DNS root zone. This means they are live! Here is one newly enabled domain with a functional website that works right now: وزارة-الأتصالات.مصر

Digital Publishing

arabnews.com, Crown prince calls for more e-books on Islam, 3 May 2010 "Crown Prince Sultan, deputy premier and minister of defense and aviation, chaired a meeting of the Supreme Council for Islamic Affairs here on Sunday and emphasized the need to publish more e-books and establish e-libraries."

Rachelle Kliger, themedialine.org, Digital Books Leave Arabs Cold, 3 May 2010 "Jalal Abdallah, managing director of Arabic E-Book, an online store for digital books in Arabic, said the most popular books sold on his site deal with culture and politics, while books on religion rank at the bottom of the list."