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Remember that politics move quickly, and people and their opinions evolve.
❊ The Online Bastard: Transliterated Arabic.
November 16, 2011 · Mustapha Hamoui
Today, Rami blogged about a Facebook advertisement that is stunning in its insolence: Fake 100$ bills for sale at 25$ each. (Update: Read _kaled’s comment)
How did that ad go through? The people at Facebook are supposed to manually check every ad before approving it. So how did that one slip through the cracks? The answer points to one of the internet’s most curious black holes: Transliterated Arabic.
Transliteration is when you use latin characters to express non-latin languages. so ( أنا إسمي مصطفى ) becomes (ana ismee Mustapha) It is very common in text-messages, twitter and facebook across the Arab world. Some write entire blog posts using it and many others write their comments on blogs with it.
It doesn’t have rules and it is amazingly complex for many reasons. You might understand transliterated Lebanese Arabic, but you might fail to understand transliterated Morroccan Arabic. The text can include English and French words, local slang, cultural references, food names and expressions. It is a living, organic language that is constantly changing and no two people use it the same.
You may not know it, but Transliterated Arabic can be a very big headache. It challenges technologies that are involved with interpreting text, text-to speech or input-output. It’s the reason why I can’t use Siri (How can I dictate: Yalla 7abibty, jeyeh 3al beit ba3d khams d2aye2 ?) and probably the reason why spy agencies and law enforcement find it difficult to monitor Arab forums. It allows criminals to organize and peddle their wares (like in the facebook example above) while staying completely outside of the radar.
Worse, it has the “Gaddafi problem”, which is that one word can be written in many, many ways. For example ( عون ) can be written as (Aoun) , (3on) , (3awn) , (Awn), (Aon), (‘awn) and (‘aon).
It is a fascinating beast that is disowned by both Latin and Arabic. It is a slang on steroids that can open doors to a lot of creative energy and freedom. But it can also be very scary.