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Help! Is This Arabic?

isthisarabic.com

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Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#121

Post by Dylan16807 »

ketzo wrote: post #118
Dylan16807 wrote: post #113

> Bonus 'I hate it' points if it's that Arabic-looking font that's just English text that looks kind of Arabic. How is a tacky font on some text that was never intended to be Arabic even approaching the badness of these other issues, let alone worse ? Or is the worry you've found a person that doesn't understand different languages exist at all ?

I think it's extra insulting when someone uses a font that's just supposed to look Arabic I have definitely seen attempts at a "global-looking" interface where fake languages were put on screen using plausible-looking fonts. Like, imagine a welcome page with "hello!" in lots of different languages, but the Arabic/Urdu/Armenian/Thai characters are all just literal gibberish that looks kind of like the alphabets in que…

Is the context just "places that are clearly supposed to be Arabic"? Sure, I can understand that being a problem. But if the font is being used as a font I don't think it should be a big deal.

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#122

Post by 10000truths »

LanceH wrote: post #85
techaqua wrote: post #48

What about farsi and other languages that use arabic script but not arabic at all? I can write (with effort lol) indonesian or javanese in arabic script https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jawi_script .

Farsi has the letter "p" which Arabic does not. That letter has three dots on top (sometimes drawn like ^. I think there may be another. Arabic only has the "sh" sound with the three dots. Trying to read Farsi, it feels like I should know what's going on but am left with the feeling that I've forgotten all my Arabic. Then I'll see some of the bonus letters.

There are four letters in Farsi that do not exist in Arabic - (گ ژ چ پ), which make the 'p', 'ch', 'zh' and 'g' sounds, respectively. But the underlying calligraphic system (RTL order, joining forms, harakat diacritics, and so on) is pretty much the same across the Arabic script and its descendants.

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#123

Post by redbell »

mehdix wrote: post #117

Also note that much like Latin script, many different languages use variations of Arabic script. The most notable one would be Persian.

I’d like to add Urdu to the list of languages that are written in Arabic letters.

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#124

Post by 4gotunameagain »

Dalewyn wrote: post #106
oefnak wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hold shift while pasting (chrome) to paste the text only, no formatting.

Or just copypasta through Notepad (or your favorite Linux equivalent) for a universal formatting-stripping solution.

for a faster universal solution in windows, press win+R and paste, copy from the run dialogue, and for a faster universal solution in linux make a script that utilizes xclip and bind it to a custom shortcut

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#125

Post by wruza »

throwntoday wrote: post #50
rippercushions wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's an approximation of how many Muslims there are in the world, making the generous but not entirely incorrect assumption that they will be familiar enough with Arabic to at least be able to tell if you've completely borked your rendering.

Funny enough there are many Muslims who can read Arabic but have almost no idea what they are reading as they don't speak it. The Quran is interpreted into many languages but prayer is read in Arabic no matter what their native language is. Reading the Quran is also preferrably done in Arabic, as translation is open to the interpretation of the translator, so the only truly immutable word is read in Arabic.

Interpretation of Arabic itself is the least problem they have. It takes a well-educated interpreter to make correct sense out of most statements.

With few exceptions, Islamic revelations do not state which Quranic verses or hadith have been abrogated, and Muslim exegetes and jurists have disagreed over which and how many hadith and verses of the Quran are recognized as abrogated,[6][7] with estimates varying from less than ten to over 500.[8][9]

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#126

Post by imiric »

ketzo wrote: post #118
Dylan16807 wrote: post #113

> Bonus 'I hate it' points if it's that Arabic-looking font that's just English text that looks kind of Arabic. How is a tacky font on some text that was never intended to be Arabic even approaching the badness of these other issues, let alone worse ? Or is the worry you've found a person that doesn't understand different languages exist at all ?

I think it's extra insulting when someone uses a font that's just supposed to look Arabic I have definitely seen attempts at a "global-looking" interface where fake languages were put on screen using plausible-looking fonts. Like, imagine a welcome page with "hello!" in lots of different languages, but the Arabic/Urdu/Armenian/Thai characters are all just literal gibberish that looks kind of like the alphabets in que…

We're talking about style at that point.

If someone is using those fonts to pass text off as being in a different language, as in the example you mention, then sure, that's egregious.

If, however, the font is use to render some text in the style of another language, then I don't see a problem with it. We've done the same with Greek, Russian, Japanese, and many other languages that have a distinctive script. Sometimes it's tacky, but I wouldn't call it insulting.

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#127

Post by redbell »

noufalibrahim wrote: post #109

The main thing here is knowledge of the language. Given how widespread Arabic is (though perhaps not so much in the gaming ecosystem which is Rami's area), it makes sense to have someone on the team knowledgeable about the language while doing translations. I encountered a (sort of) similar problem while rendering Devanagari text and wouldn't have realised If I couldn't read the text https://stackoverflow.com/questio…

> it makes sense to have someone on the team knowledgeable about the language while doing translations

Speaking about translations, I had. Laughable experience when I was experimenting with Google translate API a few years ago, when I picked some random text about solar system from Wikipedia that reads something like “Mercury is a planet of the solar system”, when translated to Arabic, it read “الزئبق هو أحد كواكب المجموعة الشمسية” , apparently, it was not be able to infer the meaning of “Mercury” from the context.

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#128

Post by adaml_623 »

quickthrower2 wrote: post #99
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…

A group of flying kookaburras flap about a body of liquid. In this group, individuals distinguish from distinct sorts. Small, big, colorful or plain, all flap wings as a way to maintain afloat. It's a sight to watch as this group zips, zooms, and turns all around. It's a natural habitat for this flying squad, and you can find it in many spots around our world. This group adds to our natural world's charm and, through…

Great example because if that text is on your corporate website then someone upstream is not doing their job

Edit: obviously it is English but it's definitely not correct for a company website.

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#129

Post by BoiledCabbage »

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…

> In general, the letter combination ال should be common.

It was a really smart way of saying you don't need to know anything at all to pattern match on this a spot a very common problem.

Also, if you haven't checked out the youtube video on that page I highly recommend it. It gives a great concise summary of the issue, and it's impressive how much I was able to learn to visually parse Arabic script with only a couple of mins into the video.

[1] - https://youtu.be/X1ynZm1wI18?t=65

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#130

Post by skrebbel »

agolio wrote: post #28

Probably a good place to ask: I want to add an arabic translation to a webpage I operate. My text editor is a bit confused by the unicode symbols. Obviously the text editor displays left-to-right no matter what as it's made for programming. What's the right way to handle this?

If the editor only has trouble displaying Arabic and does not somehow mess with the unicode representation then you should be fine. Ie you could paste an Arabic string into a JSON file, it might look like shit, but should still render correctly in your app or website (assuming you set the text direction or language properties right)

And you can always double check in a different editor to be sure nothing gets messed up. I use VS Code which, likely because its browser based, seems to get it right as well.

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