Free software unveils Arab world view

NEW YORK -- To get an Arab's view of U.S. foreign policy, look no further than the Web site of Al-Jazeera, the popular Qatari 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 now, that is.

In October, Cairo-based Sakhr Software released its Arabic-to-English translation software -- free for the world to use -- on the company's Arabic language Web portal at Ajeeb.com.

The software sits on servers at the portal, where users can access it. If you type in the URL of an Arabic language site, the translation engine will roughly convert it English. You can translate raw text as well.

A bridge over the gap

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

"It's the beginning of a solution to this misunderstanding problem," said Fahad Al-Sharekh, CEO 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.

Of course, 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 or MSNBC.

"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 searches on Yahoo! or Google, he said.

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

Statistical probability

English is much easier to reproduce in Arabic than vice versa. 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, un-punctuated sentences. Machine translations require artificial intelligence, Al-Sharekh said.

But artificial intelligence takes time to instill. 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.

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