More customers demanding Arabic instruction manuals

Anyone who has purchased electronics in the last year knows that waiting for them inside the box is a fat wad of instruction manuals in English, German, French and a number of other languages.

But you probably won't find anything in Arabic.

The reasons are simple. Over the years Arabic-speaking people have been seen as a small segment of the consumer electronic markets, whose small size and limited spending power didn't justify the development of Arabic manuals, software or hardware.

But the region's growing econ-omies have produced a growing demand for consumer electronics, and with that has come the demand for Arabic instructions.

"I think worldwide companies need to start concentrating not on the Middle East. They need to start concentrating on the Arabic population," said Sofyan A Moayed of iMachines, Bahrain's largest reseller of Apple computers. "It you want to make money in the Middle East you need to concentrate on the average man on the street who speaks Arabic."

When speaking at the International Consumer Electronics show in Las Vegas this month, Al Moayed often spoke out about the lack of software and hardware that fail to include Arabic, even pointing out the Apple's failure to include Arabic on the iPhone.

Minimal

Some companies, including Acer, Wikipedia and Microsoft, offer Arabic, but such items are often minimal when compared to English-based products or the companies' other product lines. Microsoft, for example, offers Arabic on its operating systems and Office applications but does not supports Arabic on the Xbox platform.

Still, companies seem to be listening to the type of things that Al Moayed has been saying and have started developing products that include Arabic. It's a slow process, but one that is beginning to take hold as companies begin to see the economic advantage.

"There has to be some market potential," said Torbjorn Kanestrom, senior VP for Fast, a company founded in Norway that specialised in creating search engines for businesses. "There has be a certain number of customers to make it works. It can very expensive."

But that hasn't stopped Fast from teaming with the British University in Dubai in an effort to develop a search engine that searches Arabic text.

"The real reason is the commercial opportunity. There is a large number of customers and a large number of users," said Neil Garner, vice president of Fast's international operations. "It's not just the language, it's the region."

Dr Sa'ad Ali Amin, dean of the Informatics at British University in Dubai, said there is no doubt there is a huge demand for Arabic online, but said that because Arabic can be written in so many different ways, it makes it very difficult to search.

"Of course we are mainly dealing with classical Arabic, but we have to consider other dialects," he said. "There could be names written in different ways, but the names could be dependent on the dialect."

Fast currently offer services in 22 languages, and Garner said the addition of Arabic took 18 months. He thinks the trend will continue.

"It going to improve as more of the Arab world comes online, and you have companies... doing fantastically well."

Optoma, which makes projectors, is one company hoping to do well from the introduction of Arabic. Adam Dent, a sales manager for Optoma in the MENA regions, said that when he joined the company 18 months ago, the company had 16 languages available for its products, but that did not include Arabic. Today the company includes an Arabic-version of its user guide, included on a CD, and a Quickstart Guide.

Dent said he thought including the Arabic was something the company ought to do. "If you don't include Arabic, you're saying to quite a lot of people that we don't care what you do. We don't care if you can use our products."