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Help! Is This Arabic?

isthisarabic.com

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Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#51

Post by ramin_hal9001 »

SamBam wrote: post #22
rippercushions wrote: post #5

This website is well-meaning, but will be difficult to parse if you don't have elementary Arabic and can't tell apart ال from ل ا. What it really needs is a simple reference input string, examples of how it gets broken, and what to do to fix them. The middle case, where the sentence is correctly rendered RTL but the individual words are LTR (breaking the ligatures), is particularly common and insidious because it loo…

I actually thought that part was perfectly clear. > In general, the letter combination ال should be common. So if your text has more than a few words, you should be able to look though your text and see that somewhere. I can't read Arabic but I can recognize that pattern. I went to https://www.bbc.com/arabic and could find numerous occurrences. It's a bit like saying "if you have a paragraph in 'English' and it has n…

> It's a bit like saying "if you have a paragraph in 'English' and it has no e's in it, it's probably not English."

This is true. You should also be able to see the word "the" in several places in English text, and if it is rendered as "ehT" or something like that, the ligature code may have a bug -- similar with reversing the ال (read as "al") pattern.

> I can't read Arabic but I can recognize that pattern. I went to https://www.bbc.com/arabic and could find numerous occurrences.

Really? I only ever learned to read just enough Arabic to read parts of the Quor'an and am by no means fluent, but I couldn't see any mistakes on that website myself.

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#52

Post by IIAOPSW »

olliej wrote: post #7

The core issue is people without familiarity with how non-native (to them) script can function - in the English centric world it means assuming one letter == one visual glyph, and the visual glyph won't get a different rendering depending on context. Native English speakers don't seem to really acknowledge that the English alphabet does have contextually different glyphs for the same letter: that is what capitalizati…

ah but you see, my conviction on one letter == one visual glyph context be damned is not hypocrisy nor is it cultural chauvinism. i for one am perfectly consistent. capitalization ought be abolished, tradition is not justification. language is about the encoding of information. capitalization is wasted code space. tradition is dead men telling you how to live. and after that, simplify the letters down into combinations of the same handful of strokes and curves. do ve really need letters vith tvice the horizontal space as the others? vhv not do avav vith all the letters that reach under the botton line? oet rid of bointu diaoonal lines too! eueru thino can and should be uniforn. doun uith the excebdions, consisdencu breuails! see hou nuch nicer this loohs. the uau it rebeats the sane feu elenets ouer and ouer uet is still leoible. it flous snooth lihe budder. uho needs all those letters anuvay?

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#53

Post by Nition »

ramin_hal9001 wrote: post #51
SamBam wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually thought that part was perfectly clear. > In general, the letter combination ال should be common. So if your text has more than a few words, you should be able to look though your text and see that somewhere. I can't read Arabic but I can recognize that pattern. I went to https://www.bbc.com/arabic and could find numerous occurrences. It's a bit like saying "if you have a paragraph in 'English' and it has n…

> It's a bit like saying "if you have a paragraph in 'English' and it has no e's in it, it's probably not English." This is true. You should also be able to see the word "the" in several places in English text, and if it is rendered as "ehT" or something like that, the ligature code may have a bug -- similar with reversing the ال (read as "al") pattern. > I can't read Arabic but I can recognize that pattern. I went t…

The comment was that they found numerous cases of ال, not ل ا.

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#54

Post by Semaphor »

reaperducer wrote: post #36
habibur wrote: post #10

When you doubt, use google translate instead of randomly hitting the keyboard.

According to the professional translators I work with, the results would be the same.

We just had a hilarious/sad case in German public media where it seemed like Google Translate was used for "plant shaped C4 charges" which resulted in a translation for "plant-shaped" instead of "planting shaped" [0] and then asked an expert how realistic it is that C4 was disguised as plants…

[0]: https://translate.google.com/?sl=en&tl=de&text=plant%20shape...

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#55

Post by muzani »

whoknew1122 wrote: post #2

The whole 'two billion people can read the Arabic alphabet to some degree' is a weird claim. Maybe it's possible, but there aren't two billion people with functional Arabic literacy. Most Arabic is written without small vowels (harakat). You could have script that is justified right-to-left and with letters correctly connected and it still be gibberish. And many of those 'two billion people' would be none the wiser.

I don't understand much Arabic, but I know the alphabet almost as well as the Latin alphabet. If you see something in Latin along the lines of "svciwbc oaoøoaaö", and claims to be Gaelic or whatever, you'll know that something is off - the consonants and vowels just don't work that way.

It won't fool the people who can speak the language, but I think the website is just designed to educate people so that it doesn't look like complete nonsense.

Facebook is surprisingly an offender here. It's common to mix both Arabic and Latin, say, begin with بسم الله and then write the text, sometimes in english, and it'll throw off the alignment of the text completely. You get the Latin words right aligned or the Arabic one left aligned.

Edit: I'm actually quite surprised how well HN handles this.

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#56

Post by Zuiii »

rippercushions wrote: post #5

This website is well-meaning, but will be difficult to parse if you don't have elementary Arabic and can't tell apart ال from ل ا. What it really needs is a simple reference input string, examples of how it gets broken, and what to do to fix them. The middle case, where the sentence is correctly rendered RTL but the individual words are LTR (breaking the ligatures), is particularly common and insidious because it loo…

> a simple reference input string, examples of how it gets broken, and what to do to fix them.

I really like this idea. Just have a standard set of strings covering all edge cases (even the sprawling labyrinth that is bidi) with a visual reference that shows how the correct rendering of each string would look like. Each entry would also have a description of the problem and suggested solutions.

Unlike the solutions in OP, this one is pragmatic and is actually actionable for the vast majority developers. I'm kinda surprised that something like this doesn't already exist given the substantial amount of material and visual examples already available that covers the bidi algorithm.

- https://www.w3.org/International/articles/inline-bidi-markup... - https://www.w3.org/International/articles/inline-bidi-markup... - https://www.w3.org/International/articles/inline-bidi-markup...

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#57

Post by [deleted] »

SamBam wrote: post #22
rippercushions wrote: post #5

This website is well-meaning, but will be difficult to parse if you don't have elementary Arabic and can't tell apart ال from ل ا. What it really needs is a simple reference input string, examples of how it gets broken, and what to do to fix them. The middle case, where the sentence is correctly rendered RTL but the individual words are LTR (breaking the ligatures), is particularly common and insidious because it loo…

I actually thought that part was perfectly clear. > In general, the letter combination ال should be common. So if your text has more than a few words, you should be able to look though your text and see that somewhere. I can't read Arabic but I can recognize that pattern. I went to https://www.bbc.com/arabic and could find numerous occurrences. It's a bit like saying "if you have a paragraph in 'English' and it has n…

[deleted]

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#58

Post by Zuiii »

muzani wrote: post #55
whoknew1122 wrote: post #2

The whole 'two billion people can read the Arabic alphabet to some degree' is a weird claim. Maybe it's possible, but there aren't two billion people with functional Arabic literacy. Most Arabic is written without small vowels (harakat). You could have script that is justified right-to-left and with letters correctly connected and it still be gibberish. And many of those 'two billion people' would be none the wiser.

I don't understand much Arabic, but I know the alphabet almost as well as the Latin alphabet. If you see something in Latin along the lines of "svciwbc oaoøoaaö", and claims to be Gaelic or whatever, you'll know that something is off - the consonants and vowels just don't work that way. It won't fool the people who can speak the language, but I think the website is just designed to educate people so that it doesn't l…

HN - thankfully - sends text (mostly) unmolested to browsers which generally tend to handle arabic substrings correctly (assuming the page encoding supports it).

HN /could/ make it better by setting css auto directionality for all

s, but that would be antithetical to its goals as a English-written forum.

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#59

Post by numpad0 »

Semaphor wrote: post #54
reaperducer wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to the professional translators I work with, the results would be the same.

We just had a hilarious/sad case in German public media where it seemed like Google Translate was used for "plant shaped C4 charges" which resulted in a translation for "plant-shaped" instead of "planting shaped" [0] and then asked an expert how realistic it is that C4 was disguised as plants… [0]: https://translate.google.com/?sl=en&tl=de&text=plant%20shape...

I think the parent is meant to say that MTs are only good as randomly hitting the keyboard to professional eyes...

But besides, I doubt "plant shaped C4" contains enough information to guarantee a correct answer in that case. Trying partial sentences and/or individual words through (human or machine) translations don't go well.

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#60

Post by Semaphor »

numpad0 wrote: post #59
Semaphor wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We just had a hilarious/sad case in German public media where it seemed like Google Translate was used for "plant shaped C4 charges" which resulted in a translation for "plant-shaped" instead of "planting shaped" [0] and then asked an expert how realistic it is that C4 was disguised as plants… [0]: https://translate.google.com/?sl=en&tl=de&text=plant%20shape...

I think the parent is meant to say that MTs are only good as randomly hitting the keyboard to professional eyes... But besides, I doubt "plant shaped C4" contains enough information to guarantee a correct answer in that case. Trying partial sentences and/or individual words through (human or machine) translations don't go well.

Yeah, you are right, for some reason I thought I was replying to grandparent. Removed the "maybe not" as I meant to agree with parent.

The plant shaped was not a fragment, but the whole text, this has a screenshot [0]. It was about fact-checking the Seymour Hersh Nordstream 2 article.

[0] https://nitter.librenode.org/Samy_t42/status/162879312196521...

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