Meedan blurs linguistic lines

Meedan blurs linguistic lines

With more than 340 million speakers, Arabic is one of the world's major languages - the fifth most widely spoken by some counts. 

Yet, today Global Post asks if, in fact, Arabic is a dying language.

Native Arabic speakers constitute about 3% of all internet users, according to World Bank figures. And yet, less than 1% of the contents of the internet are in Arabic.

Make no mistake, though, Arabic and the Arab world are only becoming more important online.

The Middle East and North Africa have seen the fastest growth of  internet users the world over  - a 900% increase in the past seven years - and more is being predicted.

But even if a breadth and depth of opinion, analysis and comment is developing on the Arabic web, it's all lost on the English speaking world.

Into this gap enters Meedan.

Launching its website to the public today, Meedan says it wants to "build bridges between the Arab world and the West".

"We want to enable people to talk to each other and to learn more about each other - people who live in the Arab world and speak Arabic and people who live in the West and speak English," says Anas Tawileh, vice president of Engineering at Meedan.

But what does the website do? Here's their explainer video:

Meedan is the Arabic word for town square, 34-year-old Anas explains to me on a Skype call from Toronto.

"We like to refer to our website as a town square that brings together speakers of Arabic and English to talk about things or events," he says.

The project has been in the making for three years and consists of two main elements: a socially-driven website, and the sophisticated translation engine behind it.

On the front end, news.meedan.net has a team of 50 editors and translators (most of them volunteers), who scour the web looking for news and events that impact the lives of people in the Middle East, and the West.

Once they've done that, Meedan's machine translation engine steps in, automatically showing posts in both English and Arabic.

Taking a few lessons from Wikipedia, Meedan allows anybody to correct a mistake they find in translations. Those corrections are also fed back to the translation engine, so that it can learn and improve.

Quality-assurance wise, editors and translators (many based in the Middle East) double-check both the machine translations and community-contributed corrections.

But the main point of the site is conversation. And to that end, every comment made on a post is offered in both English and Arabic. As are direct messages and user profiles.

So, for example, a blogger in Iraq can respond in Arabic to a comment someone in the US made in English.

"Hopefully, we build a more tolerant and more understanding world," Anas says of the project's long-term aims.

"I travel extensively in the [Middle East] region, and I always hear people say 'if only the American citizen understands our point of view'. I think that Meedan offers that hope, and over the next few months we will see."