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Help! Is This Arabic?

isthisarabic.com

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Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#161

Post by 8organicbits »

andrewmcwatters wrote: post #70

Crazy how there’s “two billion people” who can read Arabic and seemingly 0 of them are making serious contributions to Arabic text rendering except this one specific guy. Weird.

Not too uncommon. This (used to be?) is the case for timezones[1]. Even xkcd has joked about it [2].

I think in software once there's one great, free implementation of a hard problem there's a tendency to stick with it. If that project is maintained by one person, then so be it.

1. https://onezero.medium.com/the-largely-untold-story-of-how-o...

2. https://xkcd.com/2347/

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#162

Post by mcv »

I'm surprised that this is still such a big issue. I'd expect with unicode standards, this should handle well out of the box.

Ages ago, in 2005 or thereabouts, I was working on a website for a Jewish organisation. I don't know Hebrew, but Hebrew has many of these same issues, including the right-to-left direction, and I was quite surprised to see text from our own CMS, based on Java, with tons of XML pipelines (Cocoon! XSLT!) generating HTML to be viewed in a browser, just handled this correctly without any problems.

At least the text was right-to-left, which was the only thing I knew, but the customer presumably knew more and they were happy.

Though selecting text in a mixed left-to-right and right-to-left piece of text looks really weird. Not sure what we did with alignment there, but I vaguely recall that everything may have been centered. An ugly compromise perhaps, but centering text was still popular at the time.

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#163

Post by 8organicbits »

One thing missing is to read the docs of your UI framework. I handled translations for a Windows tool 15 years ago. Windows docs were great at explaining what to do. I found an Arabic speaker to check my work and we had it right on the first attempt. I wonder how hard it would be on other more modern platforms.

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#164

Post by quickthrower2 »

adaml_623 wrote: post #128
quickthrower2 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Hey, you now want corporate website standard English with no Es? Talk about scope creep!

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#165

Post by mcv »

adaml_623 wrote: post #128
quickthrower2 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But it may be totally correct for a website about kookaburras.

There's more than just corporate websites, and frankly, if a company of any meaningful size offers content in Arabic, I'd expect them to hire someone for that. Even part-time or freelance.

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#166

Post by quickthrower2 »

fortran77 wrote: post #64
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." For the exception, see see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gadsby_(novel)

Wow, having read the example prose, it is quite an interesting sounding book.

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#167

Post by martopix »

I remember the student union at the university of Edinburgh having massive welcome signs printed on a wall in all languages, and the Arabic one very clearly had the mistake in the points 2 and 3. Printed on a wall. It was very clear to me even though I don't speak a word of Arabic.

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#168

Post by tialaramex »

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.

So, there are degrees of literacy involved, and what we're talking about here is one step up from the bottom layer, a recognition of the writing system, not of a specific language.

I can muddle along somewhat in French, especially written French, but I have essentially no Polish despite working with more Polish people than French. Nevertheless, Polish is written in a Latin script (for about a thousand years) and so I "can read Polish to some degree". If you show me a Polish street address, and then some street signs, I can spot when the sign matches the address, because I understand that symbols which are slightly different just mean the same thing. If you give me Polish mirror writing, I know it's wrong - it's backwards, even though I don't understand it.

If I attempt this in China it won't work, because I don't understand the Han script, so I am not sure whether a symbol I'm seeing is the same symbol written more or less ornately or an entirely different symbol which just looks somewhat similar. Are the symbols backwards? Or maybe they're different symbols which just look backwards.

The layer beneath this by the way is recognition that intent exists. If you show me Chinese text I not only can't read it I'm not sure which symbols are "the same" and which are not, however I can immediately tell this is writing. The writer intended to convey meaning with these shapes, perhaps I can find somebody else to translate them for me. Whereas say, the pattern on my duvet is just a pretty pattern, it doesn't mean anything (yes, I have thought about this, no it isn't a secret messsage) and so I can't get that "translated".

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#169

Post by mcv »

10000truths wrote: post #122
LanceH wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The same issue also exists in Latin script, where German has the ß, not to mention various umlauts, strikes, circles and cedilles modifying letters of the otherwise standard Latin script.

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#170

Post by mcv »

ben_w wrote: post #155
jamiek88 wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes! It’s kinda like “hearing voices’. It sounds like English, but if you try and ‘tune in’ you can’t!

As word games, I like sentences which sound valid in multiple languages, regardless of if the meaning is changed. "Goedemorgen, ik hoop dat je bent goed".

Always fun are sentences that sound very similar and are entirely correct in both languages but mean something completely different, like:

He was in the war -- Hij was in de war (he was confused)

A stiff in the brook -- Een stijve in de broek (a boner in the pants)

Those are the two most famous examples I'm familiar with, but I'm sure there are a lot more.

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