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Help! Is This Arabic?

isthisarabic.com

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Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#181

Post by madeofpalk »

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…

> What it really needs is a simple reference input string, examples of how it gets broken, and what to do to fix them

I don't think it does. Just hire someone.

I guess really, the point Rami tries to make is that not a single person who reads Arabic was involved in the video game/advertising/website/etc. The errors are often so basic that a child could point them out.

It would be like if someone wrote English without any spaces between words. It's so painfully obviously wrong.

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#183

Post by ben_w »

smcl wrote: post #178
mcv wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Oh wow, I've encountered a lot of words in English/Czech that are "false friends" but it's too far away gramatically to construct similar sounding entire sentences . That's brilliant you can do it with English and Dutch :) Also I wonder if there's a connection between trousers being "broek" in Dutch and "breeks" in Scots. edit: wow ok I should've just went to wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeks

At a NATO spy convention, an English spy asks their Estonian, French, Spanish, German, and Bulgarian counterparts if they can see them in the new camouflage they are testing.

"Jah" "Oui" "Sí" "Ja" "Da"

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#184

Post by mytailorisrich »

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 .

That's actually what I expected the website to do: Is this Arabic vs. Farsi, etc?

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#185

Post by Symbiote »

slim wrote: post #107
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?

I recommend using gedit for this use case (available for linux and mac) it has the best support for arabic, right to left script and bidi (that's mixing rtl and ltr in the same sentence) I've ever seen

Kate (KDE's editor) is also fine.

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#186

Post by pm215 »

mcv wrote: post #175
oefnak wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That should be the default. I think it's incredibly strange to copy text including the formatting, as that is far more context and application dependent. I almost never want to copy formatting.

It's particularly silly that it pastes-with-formatting into a gmail compose box even when it's set to "send as plain text"...

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#187

Post by mytailorisrich »

ben_w wrote: post #176
mcv wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

An ex had the smaller example of incorrectly asking for "un préservatif" when she meant "un préserve". One of her friends was half of a multi-nationality couple, I think it was French and Irish, and the punchline was their kid, at a beach, yelling, in a strong Irish accent "Look mummy! Phoques!"

If by "un préserve" they meant a preserve/marmalade then in French that's "une confiture" (or "marmelade" but it's less somewhat rare). I don't think "un préserve" is a word...

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#188

Post by Symbiote »

jamiek88 wrote: post #137
redbell wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 ال…

When I translate that with safari it comes back as ‘mercury is one of the planets in the solar system’?

"Quicksilver is one of the planets in the solar system."

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#189

Post by azernik »

mcv wrote: post #162

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 (Cocoo…

For the most part, these problems only pop up when you try to render RTL text visually, and then copy it back out from UI elements. In internal pipelines, however, it's just another string of opaque bytes that you perform a few very well-specified standard library operations on.

(Arabic also has the connection challenge, which Hebrew does not, but usually renderers that do RTL right also handle the ligatures.

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#190

Post by mytailorisrich »

Galanwe wrote: post #14
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.

I would be careful linking "Muslims" and "Arabic readers/speakers". I know Muslims who would be challenged to speak more than 3 words of Arabic, as well as Arabic speakers who are Christians or atheists.

The only assumption is that Muslims may, on average, be able to "read the Arabic alphabet to some degree". Obviously 'some degree' makes it very variable, does not imply being able to really read/write/speak.

I don't know if it's true but that does not seem unreasonable.

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