There are lots of Arabic language
speakers living far away from the areas where Arabic language is spoken.
There are lots of Arabic speaking travelers, traveling abroad each year without
their laptops.
There are lots of other Arabic speaking internet users having this reason or
another to lack for real or virtual keyboard in the Arabic language.
While browsing the Internet from abroad, all these people can read in their
languages in every modern browser, text processor or e-mail service.
BUT NOT WRITE!
Besides tens of various Latin based scripts there are some
totally different alphabets. E.g. Cyrillic alphabet, Greek alphabet, Georgian
alphabet, Arabic alphabet, Armenian Alphabet etc. It means that every single
language has its special characters. Latin letter "a" alone has following
variants in the other languages:
ä, à, á, â, ă, æ, å, ą, ā, ã, ạ, ằ!
These are not "a"'s. Even if this are
not always formally parts of the corresponding alphabets, they denote different
sounds. So, they are full scale different characters. They are also parts of
some personal, brand and geographic names. As a result of impossibility to set
up somebody else's computer and of unavailability of corresponding virtual
keyboards the Arabic speaking Internet users experience the following
difficulties:
1) Difficulty to type in Arabic alphabet: computers that
are used in Internet cafes, hotels, post, at friends' or business partners' are
not equipped with corresponding Arabic keyboards and their software can not
always be easily switched into the Arabic language.
2) Exposure to the wrong Ads in irrelevant languages:
unavailability of corresponding Arabic language software, hardware or Arabic
virtual keyboards encourages people to transliterate their texts (they use
English script to type in Arabic).
3) Difficulty to search: e.g. if one searches for a French
text on "Prèsident" search engines return results on "President" in English
which are not relevant for the French speaker. If one hopes to find German text
on "Prasident", having no possibility to spell correctly "Präsident" search
engine suggest him to switch again to English word "President".
4) Difficulty to log into favorite web-services: some
Arabic internet services still encourage their users to log in with their names
spelled with special characters of the Arabic alphabet.
So, we have recently started a multilingual project that
helps our users to write in over 30 different alphabets and scripts. The
principle we use in our virtual keyboards is called transliteration or
transcribing. It is a process that converts characters (letters) of one alphabet
(script system) into another.
The service is free of charge and we warmly encourage you using it. If you find
it useful, INFORM YOUR FRIENDS ABOUT IT.
