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It's All Arabic-English to Him
jannah
05/27/02 at 02:17:48
It's All Arabic-English to Him
By Joanna Glasner

2:00 a.m. Nov. 12, 2001 PST
Ask most people what they think of free Internet translation services, and their first associations are of bizarre sentence structures and amusing syntactic snafus.

But where others see garbled grammar, Fahad Al Sharekh sees a new era of global communication.

As chief executive of Arabic and English portal site Ajeeb.com , Al Sharekh believes that the error-prone technology known as machine translation has played a key part in speeding the exchange of information between the English-speaking world and the Middle East.

Four weeks ago, Ajeeb introduced what its founder says is the first free online service that instantly translates Arabic websites into English. The company, a division of Arabic-language programming firm Sakhr Software, has been running an English-to-Arabic translation service for more than a year.

Al Sharekh, a Kuwaiti citizen educated in the United States, admits that machine translation -- despite momentous improvements in recent years -- is still far from perfect.

Any arguments to the contrary are quickly disproved by a glance at the website of Arabic news agency Al Jazeera, where translations of headlines range from the humorous: "Concord returns to the service after a year of the stop" to the not entirely intelligible: "An Israeli incursion is near an embryo and Buch he refuses Arafat meeting."

But given the voracious demand for news from abroad in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, Al Sharekh tells Wired News that users are learning to live with a little weird grammar.

Wired News: Why did you decide to launch an English and Arabic translation site?

Fahad Al Sharekh: We realized there is one impediment for the Internet to be accepted in the Arabic-speaking world. It is language. The World Wide Web is built with English domains. Ninety percent of the content on the Web is English.

We know a lot of people here are educated. They're computer literate. They have Internet access. But they don't speak English, and that's what's stopping them from using the Web and the Internet the way they should.

WN: How is it doing?

Al Sharekh: For the month of October, we just hit something like 14 million requests for English to Arabic translation. So far, we've had about a million requests to translate Arabic to English.

WN: Which site are you getting the most requests to translate?

Al Sharekh: For Arabic to English, it's Aljazeera.net, the Arabic satellite news agency. They're very good, very controversial, and their website is big. So far about 90 percent of Arabic to English translations are for this one site.

WN: What English-language sites are Arabic speakers most interested in?

Al Sharekh: Before, CNN was the most popular site. Now people are bored, because what's going on is almost a routine: "OK, we're bombing Afghanistan again." Since people got bored, I'm noticing they're going back to their regular Web browsing, and Yahoo is No. 1.

WN: Isn't it difficult to set up a translation system for two languages that are so different?

Al Sharekh: For translating Arabic to English, it's a huge challenge. Arabic's a very old language. It doesn't have vowels. It has no punctuation. There are no capital letters. The machine translation engine has to tell from the context what a word means. For example, Taliban in Arabic is literally "two students," and this was the way it was translated on our machine translation service initially.

While the search in English text is simple and there are many tools available for this, the search in Arabic text is very difficult. There are many forms for Arabic words, with suffixes, prefixes and root words, and words change completely when used in different tenses and forms.

WN: With all those complicated grammar issues to consider, how accurate are the results?

Al Sharekh: There are problems. There are glitches and bugs. This is software, after all.

We recognize that the aim of machine translation is to give a good idea about the general meaning of the material, and human translation quality cannot be reached through machine translation. It's not accurate. It sounds weird. It has some grammatical mistakes. Some of the acronyms make no sense. And as the content gets more and more complicated, the translation is going to be less accurate.

Accuracy requires professional human translation.

WN: What are you doing to make things better?

Al Sharekh: We can't just depend on the machine translation engine. We had to teach the computer all these names: Taliban, Osama bin Laden, all the names of Afghan cities and towns. Whoever's on CNN talking, I want their name entered in English and Arabic.

We also recently launched Johaina, a news gathering service with an Arabic language interface. An English site will be fully functional soon. The service monitors -- around the clock -- hundreds of Arabic and English websites, detects any new articles and updates and categorizes them. Users request the full human translation of an article from the site to be delivered within hours to their e-mail inboxes.

WN: How do you think the events of Sept. 11 affected the way people are using your site?

Al Sharekh: Here, the masses want their daily fix of news. They hear what our government has to say, but they also want to hear what BBC and ABC have to say.

WN: What about among English speakers?

Al Sharekh: Before Sept. 11, with all fairness, people in America didn't want to know what's going on anywhere else. They can't even spell Afghanistan. Now, this whole isolationist perspective won't do anymore. A small, messed-up cult in another part of the world can affect you in your hometown.

I never thought many people would read Arabic newspapers in English. However, now I have a whole new crowd of people who are reading Arabic newspapers and Arabic websites in English.

WN: Are there any sites you would recommend for English speakers looking for an Arabic news fix?

Al Sharekh: Besides Aljazeera.net, there's Asharq Al-Awsat from Saudi Arabia, Al Hayat from the United Kingdom and Al-Ahram from Egypt.

WN: What's next for you?

Al Sharekh: We're working on integrating our speech technologies. For example, people who don't like using the keyboard can speak Arabic into a machine, have the speech translated to text, have the text translated to English, and then have it spoken aloud. That's around the corner.

We're also working on enhancing the performance of the translation engine to improve the accuracy. I don't think it's ever going to finish.
05/27/02 at 02:22:20
jannah


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