Raising awareness on using Arabic online

Abu Dhabi: Google, in cooperation with companies from around the region, will develop and launch an event titled Arabic Web Days.

The event, which runs from November 20 to December 20, aims to promote Arabic content online by raising awareness about how users can contribute to the Arabic digital content. Only three per cent of online content is in Arabic today, despite the fact that Arabic is one of the fastest growing languages online with 280 million Arabic internet users.

“There’s a huge gap between the people who speak Arabic and the amount of Arabic content online and we see that in the Middle East that everyone’s embracing the internet and the usage numbers are up; users are creating amazing content, but we want them to do more. It’s not enough,” said Maha Abouelenein, Head of Communications for the Mena region at Google.

“It’s not Google’s job or anybody’s job to create the Arabic web, but all of us collectively adding content to the web to make it more relevant for us.”

Abouelenein said that there is a lot of content in the Arabic, but it has not been digitised yet. “There is content, but we need to digitise them,” she said. “So it’s a matter of getting people to think digital and to think online, so everyone can access it.”

Arabic Web Days includes a series of activities, both online and offline, including teaching users how to search engine optimisation in Arabic, how to create a website in Arabic, how to create a Wikipedia page in Arabic, how to create an Arabic URL, etc.

Open Translation Project

This week the UAE had its first Arabic Web Days event which brought officials from TED to talk about their Open Translation Project and how they’ve been working on providing the popular TED Talks in different languages including Arabic, as well as their plans to launch the TED website in Arabic.

TED launched their translation project in 2009 with about 200 translators, 40 languages and 300 translations. Today TED has 32,000 translations and 92 languages and about 10,000 translators, all of whom do this on a volunteer basis.

TED had been looking at localising their website which is basically translating it into Arabic, said Kristin Windbigler from TED. After meeting with the co-founders of Taghreedat, which is an international Arabic digital content community, they put the word out for their translators and the website was translated within a week, she said. The website is expected to be launched in 2013.

Windbigler said that now with the success of their translation project, TED is pushing for the independent TED events or TEDx to be done in the local language. “There has to be some content to drive people there. We started out with the English talks and they have been translated into Arabic and that’s the logical next step,” she said.

Speaking to some of the Arabic translators, they said that the drive behind giving up their time to translate had been their interest in sharing some of the inspiring TED talks with their friends and family.

“Once I did the first one, it was like an addiction,” said Mahmoud Aghiorly of Syria, who has translated over 180 talks in the past year and a half.

“As soon as I found out about the Open Translation Project, I immediately joined. It was my way of giving back to my community,” said Khalid Marbou of Morroco, who has so far translated 150 talks.

Samy Al Mubarak, co-founder of Taghreedat, said that out of that three per cent of Arabic digital content, much of it remains personal such as comments, jokes and pictures. It’s not useful content for the person who wants to use the internet as a medium for his business,” he said. “The Arabic users are more content consumers than producers,” he said. “So what we are promoting is for people to create useful content.”

“The Arabic users also don’t have a reference to Arabic technical terms so for example if I want to use the word tweet and this wasn’t there before because the twitter interface was only in English so people had to refer to writing the word in English,” he said. “So we’re trying to promote the use the official Arabic word.”

Al Mubarak said that institutions and organisations have a huge role in this as long as they’re producing their content in Arabic.

“If you’re talking about a knowledge-based economy then the core of that is content and if there’s no content in Arabic, you’re building a barrier right there,” he said.

To find out more about the Arabic Web Days, check www.arabicwebdays.com.