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Help! Is This Arabic?

isthisarabic.com

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Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#141

Post by michaelt »

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 think the author is aiming for "You're making a prop for a film with Arabic text, or making a multilingual sign, are you doing it right?" rather than "You're writing a text editor, are you doing it right?"

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#142

Post by khaled »

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’?

In Arabic, Mercury (planet) and mercury (element) are two different words (عطارد and زئبق), here the machine translation is using the wrong mercury for the context.

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#143

Post by cardiffspaceman »

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.

That’s what I meant by “the paste via third app maneuver”.

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#144

Post by chakintosh »

marmee wrote: post #79

> Photoshop breaks Arabic. We even have a website that will break our Arabic so that Photoshop breaks it back to normal. Yes, Adobe is aware. No, they do not care. Photoshop since time immemorial had a Middle East edition (ME) which supported RTL and used to curb piracy I don’t know how it’s with their new pseudo-sass but I think they integrated it into their main product

Oh man. I remember from 15 years ago or so when I used to struggle with arabic script, would often resort to writing in another software and exporting it to PNG or EPS in order to use it in PS. Luckily, there was a 3rd party add-on that fixed that issue.

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#145

Post by neoberg »

randommar wrote: post #38
Galanwe wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#146

Post by chakintosh »

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.

> You could have script that is justified right-to-left and with letters correctly connected and it still be gibberish.

That just simply means you can't read arabic. You absolutely do not need to vowels to be able to read arabic, if you know the language, you know the vocabulary and know how a word should be pronounced. The vowels are there to aid in clarity. In most cases one single vowel could outright turn a word into its own antonym. And right now, 99% of arabic text is written without vowels apart from Quran and literary works.

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#147

Post by someweirdperson »

khaled wrote: post #105
saagarjha wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe that’s the specific guy that was referenced.

That is not the point I’m making, rather a single person is responsible for how most of software render text in most of the world writing systems and no one is wondering how 6 billion people on this planet so much depend on the work of “this one guy”. It is because text layout is something 99% of software developers can’t do right if their lives depended on it (same for anything that involves the irregularities of hu…

> It is because text layout is something 99% of software developers can’t do right if their lives depended on it (same for anything that involves the irregularities of human nature, software developers are not cut for this).

Many can't even get the spaces before and after punctuation right, even though the correct way involves no irregularities.

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#148

Post by braingenious »

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…

>They should at least be close if the author isn't trying to pump up the numbers in a misleading way.

I’m genuinely confused here. The author was pretty much crystal clear about how he defined the size of the group that he was talking about, I do not understand how a person could be confused let alone feel the need to accuse him of being intentionally misleading.

What exactly is the nefarious goal that the author was trying to sneak past you with his clever trick of speaking in plain english?

Re: Help! Is This Arabic?

#149

Post by darkwater »

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…

Now, find anothEr 20% of commEnts hErE that follow the samE rulE as yours.
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