Facebook launches Arabic version
Posted by Jaiken Struck on March 11th, 2009Facebook, the world’s most successful social networking site, has officially launched in Arabic, tapping into a potentially huge market in the Middle East and beyond, the company has announced.
Facebook already has large numbers of users in the Arab world: the site has 900,000 users in Egypt, more than 250,000 in Saudi Arabia and more than 300,000 in Lebanon. Arabic, spoken by 250 million people – and Hebrew, spoken by 7 million – will now be available from a drop-down menu at the bottom of the homepage.
Facebook asked users of a trial version to translate the site over the past month. After providing suggestions, users discussed and voted for the best translations. As a result, Facebook is now available in 40 languages with more than 60 others in development.
The company said that 850 Arabic speakers and 870 Hebrew speakers had helped with the project, out of a total of 200,000 people who had helped with translations.
Arabic and Hebrew, semitic languages that are both written from right to left, posed special challenges. For example, while the verb “write” in English is the same regardless of whether the person doing the writing is a male or female, different translations of “write” are required in both languages.
Design was another challenge, since a web page laid out from right to left looks like a mirror image of an equivalent English page. All components on the page had to be changed for right-to-left languages including text alignment, ordering of tabs on pages, different fields on forms, labels, buttons and much more.
Read more: The Guardian
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