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.A SOFTWARE COMPANY that converts transliterated text into Arabic characters has won the Pan Arab Web Awards’ “Best Web Technology Award” for 2008

Language Analytics, LLC, won the award for its website Yamli.com which provides web based tools enabling users to type in Arabic script, even when using an English language keyboard, as well as performing Google searches in Arabic and copying Arabic text into electronic documents.

.The site makes accessing Arabic content that much easier for millions of people around the world

It’s not that Arabic keyboards aren’t available, just that they are not widely used, and most Arabic speakers end up using English keyboards by default. This, however, doesn’t mean that Arab language users have to write in English, and in fact a system has arisen whereby most Arabic speakers just spell out Arabic words phonetically using English characters. And Yamli facilitates matters by converting English character transliterations into Arabic script as a person types.

Because not everyone spells phonetic words in the same way, Yamli has also come up with a system that will accept various different spellings of the same Arabic word, and also shows the user a list of suggested matches for words that are not recognised by the system. As the programme develops, Yamli hopes to be able to increase its accuracy by accepting more popular word patterns.

The site’s co-founder, Imad Jureidini, was extatic at winning the award and gushed that the award was not only recognition of a technology breakthrough, “but also of the Arabic web’s need for such technology.”

The site’s other co-founder, Habib Haddad, noted that the current level of Arabic content on the Internet was extremely low (0.5 per cent), but that Yamli’s goal was “to empower the Arabic language on the web”. He added “We are going to continue to increase that percentage to a much higher number”. µ

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