Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Help! Is This Arabic?

isthisarabic.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 304 posts

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#201

Post by 8organicbits »

NhanH wrote: post #192
8organicbits wrote: post #157

One of my favorite observations about forms that are in Arabic and English (or any left-to-right and right-to-left language pair) is that you don't need to pick one language as the primary language. The trick is to put the English on the left, a blank field in the middle, and the Arabic on the right. This way an English speaker will naturally read the form as an English form with the Arabic translation off to the rig…

Your text inputs still need to flow either left-to-right or right-to-left though? In which use case would this be useful?

If we're talking about an HTML text input field, you can use `dir=auto`. Other tools should have similar features. This approach is also very common on paper, which naturally flows in the correct direction.

https://www.w3schools.com/tags/att_global_dir.asp

https://caniuse.com/mdn-html_global_attributes_dir

Edit: oh use case? Imagine a PDF form you'd like someone to fill out, or a page that may get printed. You could create two forms and let the person filling out the form pick their language, but the person processing the form may prefer to read the form in the other language.

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#202

Post by madeofpalk »

fatih-erikli wrote: post #100

Do arabic peoples seek the videos from right to left too? If not, would they want?

My understanding, preferably, yes. https://m2.material.io/design/usability/bidirectionality.htm...

> 7. Progress bars fill in the same direction as content is read

In general, if it represents "start to finish", or it has "forwards or backwards", then it should be mirrored. Above site has good examples for how a bicycle icon should be mirrored (as facing left is going "forwards"), but a magnifying glass would not.

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#203

Post by psychphysic »

IanCal wrote: post #194
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…

> and can't tell apart ال from ل ا. Who can't tell these apart? I know literally no Arabic - these characters look very much like latin ones I and J, and it's just an order thing. It seems like an excellent quick test to me to see if there's ordering problems.

Exactly if you aren't comfortable with the idea that glyphs are distinct and order can be assumed to matter.

This article can't possibly be scoped for someone like that.

There's a side note here, that dyslexia can become apparent in very different written languages.[0]

In which case don't try and handle multilingual text pay someone else, even if that's on fiverr.

[0] https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/its-all-ch...

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#204

Post by Oxidation »

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…

Ah yes, the good old "your heuristic doesn't work on my carefully constructed pathological case" observation, wouldn't be the Internet without that.

GP also said "probably". That's how heuristics work.

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#205

Post by ta1243 »

martopix wrote: post #167

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.

Mistranslations are always a source of amusement

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/7702913.stm

> When officials asked for the Welsh translation of a road sign, they thought the reply was what they needed.

> Unfortunately, the e-mail response to Swansea council said in Welsh: "I am not in the office at the moment. Send any work to be translated".

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#206

Post by zirgs »

ta1243 wrote: post #205
martopix wrote: post #167

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.

Mistranslations are always a source of amusement http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/7702913.stm > When officials asked for the Welsh translation of a road sign, they thought the reply was what they needed. > Unfortunately, the e-mail response to Swansea council said in Welsh: "I am not in the office at the moment. Send any work to be translated".

Wouldn't it make sense for translators to send messages like that in multiple languages?

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#207

Post by fatih-erikli »

madeofpalk wrote: post #202
fatih-erikli wrote: post #100

Do arabic peoples seek the videos from right to left too? If not, would they want?

My understanding, preferably, yes. https://m2.material.io/design/usability/bidirectionality.htm... > 7. Progress bars fill in the same direction as content is read In general, if it represents "start to finish", or it has "forwards or backwards", then it should be mirrored. Above site has good examples for how a bicycle icon should be mirrored (as facing left is going "forwards"), but a magnifying glass would not.

It's a dilemma, either teaching English to everyone, or recreating the UI style guides from zero point.

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#208

Post by ben_w »

mytailorisrich wrote: post #187
ben_w wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Although I may be misremembering the exact word as I have a GCSE grade D from 23 years ago, her French is much better than mine as she lived in Paris for a few years.

It was certainly something close to what I wrote.

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#209

Post by zarzavat »

AdamN wrote: post #200
zarzavat wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a difference between literacy and fluency. Literacy is ability to understand a writing system. I am literate in the Latin alphabet. Fluency is ability to understand a language. I am fluent in English. Neither implies the other. You can be fluent but illiterate (the default until modern universal education), and literate but not fluent (I am literate in the Latin alphabet but I am not fluent in Italian). The…

2B still seems like a stretch. Can 2B people read (even with low comprehension) a basic paragraph in Arabic? My SWAG would be 1B people.

If it's Quranic Arabic then the orthography includes vowel markings so vocalising it is considerably easier.

The number of people who can vocalise Arabic without the vowel marks (e.g. a newspaper) is considerably less. But you don't need to be able to do that to notice any of the errors in the article.

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#210

Post by pessimizer »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #116
braingenious wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>'two billion people can read the Arabic alphabet to some degree' is a weird claim. Not really, because >there aren't two billion people with functional Arabic literacy. isn’t something that the author claimed. “To some degree” is a phrase that explicitly states that the author isn’t talking about full functional literacy. It would be a super weird claim if “some degree” and “full functional literacy” meant the same…

> It would be a super weird claim if “some degree” and “full functional literacy” meant the same thing, but they don’t! They should at least be close if the author isn't trying to pump up the numbers in a misleading way. I definitely assumed that number would be close to the literate number, and not including people who can recognize a tiny fraction. Hell, I can read Arabic "to some degree" if we're being completely…

This doesn't make any sense. Why would you want the meaning of "some degree of knowledge" and "full functional literacy" to be close? What's misleading about describing exactly what you're talking about? Who cares how many people are literate in Arabic in this context? What you care about is how many people know enough about Arabic to know that you don't know anything about Arabic.

You seem to be demanding that "people who know enough medical terminology and/or Latin to see through your fictional doctor" be nearly the same class as "people who are doctors," and what's more, implying that's some sort of deception.

> No need to be rude.

Post reply on HN