Software Firm Aims to Bridge Language Gap

To get an Arab’s view of U.S. foreign policy, look no further than the Web site of Al Jazeera, the popular Qatar-based satellite TV station whose site is peppered with photos of slain Afghan and Palestinian children.

But unless you read Arabic, a language which employs its own alphabet, there’s no way to read the text.

Until recently, that is.

In October, Sakhr Software of Cairo released its Arabic-to-English translation software on the company’s Arabic language Web portal at Ajeeb.com.

By typing in the Web address of an Arabic language site, the translation engine will roughly convert it to English. It translates raw text as well.

The company hopes the software will give Americans a window into Arab thinking, and vice versa.

“It’s the beginning of a solution to this misunderstanding problem,” said Fahad Al-Sharekh, chief executive of Ajeeb.com. “This is what’s going to bridge the gap between the two civilizations.”

Much of Al Jazeera’s reporting focuses on conflicts in the Middle East and Afghanistan, depicting them from an Arab perspective mostly unavailable in the U.S. media.

Al Jazeera isn’t the only news site Ajeeb translates--just the most popular, said Al-Sharekh, a Kuwaiti who attended high school and college in the United States. The site also links to other Arabic-language providers.

Ajeeb’s translations of Al Jazeera spiked during the opening weeks of the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan, when the network gathered video of civilian casualties in Taliban-controlled Kabul--apparently from U.S. bombs--and began playing videotaped dispatches from Osama bin Laden.

Al-Sharekh, interviewed by phone from Kuwait, said news-hungry Web surfers flock to the translator after big events in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, as well.

But Sakhr’s translation engine, little known outside the Arab world, is far more commonly used to translate the other way, from English to Arabic.

Al-Sharekh said Arab speakers use it to get an American perspective on the war by reading the news on CNN’s or MSNBC’s sites.

“Now people can read what the Americans say first hand, in Arabic. They don’t have to listen to their governments,” said Al-Sharekh. “This goes both ways.”

Many Arabic speakers, literate in computers but not English, use it simply to plumb the English-dominated Internet by translating results from Internet search engines, he said.

Translations are shaky--especially on the Arabic-to-English side--and reading them often requires patience.

English is much easier to reproduce in Arabic than the other way around. It can be done largely through statistical probability calculations, without the need for sketchy artificial intelligence, Al-Sharekh said.

In Arabic, words that have two dozen meanings can flow in long, unpunctuated sentences. Machine translations require artificial intelligence, Al-Sharekh said.

But artificial intelligence takes time to install. Since the launch of its service, Ajeeb has employed human translators to tweak the computer’s renditions of popular pages to make them understandable in English.

In doing so, the artificial intelligence engine “learns” from the corrections.

“Over time the accuracy increases dramatically,” Al-Sharekh said.

Sakhr Software, a company with about 400 employees based outside Cairo, has its own history of dodging bullets.

The company originated in Kuwait in 1982 but fled to Cairo in the face of the Iraqi invasion of 1990, said Mark Meinke, general manager of Digitek International, the Falls Church, Va.-based U.S. distributor of Sakhr’s products.

In 1985 the company gained notice in the Arab world for releasing a digitized, searchable Koran which allowed students and worshippers to quickly find particular passages, Meinke said.

The company launched its Ajeeb.com Web portal in 1999, which mimics the search functions and hierarchical cataloging of Yahoo.

Sakhr now keeps its marketing offices in Dubai, its programmers in Egypt and its computer servers in Boston, Al-Sharekh said.

Ajeeb employs 50 full-time workers and as many as 100 part-time programmers, called in as warranted by site traffic--and news events.