Thousands of volunteers who helped to bring more Arabic content to Twitter now have their sights set on doing the same for other popular websites.
About 2,500 linguists, translators and online enthusiasts from 28 countries will contribute to new projects to increase Arabic-language content on Wikipedia. New motivational sayings in Arabic, as well as famous ones in English that will be translated, will appear on WikiQuote.
Taghreedat, an online community that started in Qatar and works to build Arabic-language content, launched an initiative in July to target Twitter and is spearheading the new projects. It is relying on strategic advice and support from twofour54, a free zone in Abu Dhabi for media and entertainment companies.
"With Arabic Web content accounting for less than 2 per cent of the total Web content, twofour54 and Taghreedat share a mutual commitment to developing Arabic e-content across multiple platforms," said Noura Al Kaabi, the chief executive of twofour54.
"These projects serve to encourage Arabic-speaking media professionals to play their own role in developing a sustainable and commercial media and entertainment industry for Abu Dhabi and the region."
Currently, the most time-consuming project includes work on an online dictionary that would take words not already found in Arabic, such as "tweet", and create translations for them. In other cases, multiple words may exist in Arabic for one English word, and the goal would be to narrow the Arabic range to a single word, said Mina Nagy Michel Takla, the co-founder of Taghreedat.
With guidance from twofour54, Taghreedat also plans to harness its network of volunteers to expand the quantity of Arabic in other areas, including digital books and comics, subtitles in online video clips, as well as the text that normally appears in English on social networking home pages. The broader goal is to move away from translating only between English and Arabic, and providing more original content across different kinds of media formats, said Sami Mustafa Mubarak, another Taghreedat co-founder.
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