Nature Middle East | House of Wisdom

Digitalizing Arabic

QCRI Qatar Foundation.jpg

Qatar Foundation for Education, Science and Community Development (QF) has joined the efforts to increase the quality of machine-translation of Arabic through its new Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI), founded in August 2010.

It brought together experts from nine different countries, including academics from renowned institutions such as Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar, Columbia University in US, Sorbonne University in France and Dublin University, Ireland.

QCRI executive director Ahmed Elmagarmid was quoted saying “The future of the Arabic language is digital and QCRI is seeking to leverage technologies to keep Arabic alive and well in the digital world.”

The main challenge is that Arabic has always evolved as an oral language, which makes it complicated to translate into “machine language” to facilitate translation and digitalization.

Five years ago, the Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Alexandria, Egypt, partnered with the UN-founded Universal Networking Digital Language (UNDL) Foundation to set up an Arabic-UNL Center at the library. UNDL is working on creating a unified machine language that can facilitate accurate translation between different languages. The idea is that computers would pick up a language, translates it into the its own Universal Networking Language (UNL). This language can then be translated into any other language.

The Bibliotheca Alexandrina is designing and implementing the Arabic component in the development of this language and will act as an active language center for Arabic.

QF is hopeful that their efforts would help propel Arabic into the digital age, and allow the preservation and spread of Arab culture and support Arabic businesses.

Through the conference, QCRI wants to identify a role it can play to to keep Arabic alive and well in the digital world through computational research.

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