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Help! Is This Arabic?

isthisarabic.com

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Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#251

Post by bombcar »

madeofpalk wrote: post #181
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…

It's one thing for a small personal project to get this stuff wrong, and there's somewhat of a baseline you can try yourself, but nobody is really going to care that much. It's like those funny pictures of restaurants in China with an English name of TRANSLATION SERVER ERROR.

What the site is about and where hiring someone makes sense is anything "big budget", especially if your target market includes Arabic-speaking or Arabic-adjacent countries.

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#252

Post by H8crilA »

lelandfe wrote: post #250
disintegrator wrote: post #213

Tangentially, for those doing web development, CSS has a bunch of "logical" properties [1] that adapt to the locale of the user agent. For example, you can swap out `margin-left` and `margin-bottom` in your CSS with `margin-inline-start` and `margin-block-end` respectively. Similarly, `text-align` accepts start/end instead of left/right. Even if you're not targetting right-to-left or top-to-bottom locales, it's easy…

Do "top-to-bottom locales" exist? Has anyone built a site with users that get utility out of these? I've usually found that the arguments for these properties revolve around, "well, what if I decide to use traditional Mongolian in the future?," which seems like the biggest case of YAGNI I can think of. I suspect their popularity is owed to tutorial authors showing off their CSS prowess. (I'm also not convinced of the…

Japanese is actually top to bottom, but they largely gave up on that idea. Probably too much hassle.

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#253

Post by throwaway2203 »

neoberg wrote: post #145
randommar wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i think every muslim can speaks more than 3 words, every muslim known what al fatiha is. that's 25 words.

I grew up in a Muslim environment and I know al fatiha and more. But I don't understand a single word of it or can't tell if what I recited is a word or a whole sentece. I believe 99% of the population in my country are the same. Also we can't read Arabic script.

What country did you grow up in? We all don't speak arabic but can fluently read the script.

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#254

Post by bombcar »

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.

Let's assume there's a correct "brand" for Coca Cola in Arabic (I have no idea if there is, but I'm sure there's some large brand that was localized) - there will certainly be a very large number of people who recognize that brand name, even if they cannot read, and will recognize it if you break it, just like someone with no literacy at all can recognize something is broke if they see a coke can labelled LOCA CACO.

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#255

Post by jcuenod »

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.

At the end of the "It's a small world" ride at Disney, FL, there's a sign in Zulu that translates to "goodbye". But in Zulu, how you say goodbye depends on whether the person you're saying goodbye to is staying or going. The sign at the ride says goodbye as though the rider is staying (implying that the ride is leaving).

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#256

Post by bombcar »

jamiek88 wrote: post #131
smcl wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 This is what Dutch sounds like to me as an English speaker - plenty of common sounds with English; it has a similar speed, rhythm, intonation to English. It feels like I’m hearing English but have lost my faculties to parse it

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

I know some Spanish and hearing Portuguese does this to me every time; it's like I've almost tuned in but there's nothing there.

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#257

Post by bombcar »

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 .

Point 3 mentioned that:

3. The text is in the wrong Arabic-script language, for example Farsi in Egypt (Egyptians primarily speak an Egyptian Dialect of Arabic), or Modern Standard Arabic in Afghanistan (Afghans speak Dari, an Afghan Persian language). Comme l'alphabet latin, vous pouvez écrire différentes langues avec l'alphabet arabe.

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#258

Post by disintegrator »

lelandfe wrote: post #250
disintegrator wrote: post #213

Tangentially, for those doing web development, CSS has a bunch of "logical" properties [1] that adapt to the locale of the user agent. For example, you can swap out `margin-left` and `margin-bottom` in your CSS with `margin-inline-start` and `margin-block-end` respectively. Similarly, `text-align` accepts start/end instead of left/right. Even if you're not targetting right-to-left or top-to-bottom locales, it's easy…

Do "top-to-bottom locales" exist? Has anyone built a site with users that get utility out of these? I've usually found that the arguments for these properties revolve around, "well, what if I decide to use traditional Mongolian in the future?," which seems like the biggest case of YAGNI I can think of. I suspect their popularity is owed to tutorial authors showing off their CSS prowess. (I'm also not convinced of the…

I'd say it's YAGNI if it required going out of your way to add something on top of your project. CSS logical properties mirror traditional properties one-for-one. Once you know about them why would you go back to older layout properties? The need to support different locales is really a question of what product you're building or audiences your targeting. e-commerce, news sites, social networks... they seem like good use cases for making the switch and future proofing a little.

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#259

Post by bombcar »

kmeisthax wrote: post #61

>Bonus 'I hate it' points if it's that Arabic-looking font that's just English text that looks kind of Arabic. There's a faux-katakana font someone used for the titles on an otherwise amazing album of some FM synth Touhou remixes[0] that hardcore fucks with my brain. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=24x3AL7yMX0

There's a whole subculture of using Cyrillic to make "Russian-sounding" things but it's just English with reversed letters. Hilariously amusing to anyone who knows any Cyrillic language.

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#260

Post by bombcar »

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’?

This is the problem with machine translation, often a round trip gets you back something that looks reasonable.

Some of them let you click on each word and see which it picked, but that doesn't always work.

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