Beyond Borders: Web Globalization Strategies

FIRST THOUGHTS

Arabic belongs to the Semitic family of languages, which also includes Hebrew and Amharic (primarily spoken in Egypt). Arabic, the language of the Qur’an, is widely used throughout the Muslim world. Like Chinese, Arabic has many dialects. An Arabic speaker in Morocco might not be able to understand an Arabic speaker in Iran, although they share a common written language. Arabic uses considerably fewer characters than Chinese or Japanese, yet that does not make it any less challenging for web localization. $34011In fact, Arabic poses some of the greatest web localization challenges because of poor software support and an acute shortage of Arabic translators. The American Translators Association lists only 65 English-to-Arabic ...