DjangoCon Europe 2016 - Introducing Django to the Foreign World

Speaker: Bashar Al-Abdulhadi: Open source activist from Kuwaiti

Arabish

Arabic (language) + English (alphabet) + numeric conventions, born out of missing letters and visual similarity:

• both 2 and 3 symbolize different kinds of 'a'
• 5 symbolizes 'kh'
• 6 is a second 't'
• 7 is a starting 'h'
• 8 is 'q'-ish

Tools and History

yamli and later gmail and other tools: type in Arabish, and get Arabic words as suggestions. Microsoft started with Windows XP to offer a right-to-left oriented arabic user interface.

Slowly websites and android started supporting joining letters together, so the next problem was the database. Sometimes, browsers would interpret Arabic as unicode, too.

Initiative: arabeyes.org

Arabeyes.com started in the 90s, and provides among other things a technical dictionary, voted on by the community, to stanardize the technical terms in the arabic language.

Takeaways

Add your package to collaborative translation sites and support your native language on other packages. A little continuous contribution is better than one large bulk contribution.