BBC Learning English
Words in the News
Twitter helps non-Arabic speakers
5 July 2013
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Words in the News
© British Broadcasting Corporation 2013
Page 1 of 2
bbclearningenglish.com
The social media site Twitter has launched a translation tool to help non-Arabic speakers
understand what's going on in Egypt. It automatically translates messages posted in
Arabic on Twitter by leading figures in the protests into the reader's own language.
Mark Gregory reports for the BBC:
Many of the major players in the political turmoil that's engulfed Egypt in recent days
have large followings on Twitter. But for the most part, unsurprisingly, they post their
messages in Arabic.
Now Twitter has launched a service that aims to spread their words to a wider
international audience. It's using a translation tool provided through Microsoft's Bing
search engine to convert Arabic messages into other languages. This meant, for
example, that non-Egyptians had instant access to messages put on Twitter by former
president Mohammed Morsi as he was ousted from power by the army.
Non-Egyptians can also follow the Twitter musings of other significant players such as
Mohammed ElBaradei, the ex-UN atomic energy agency chief.
But Twitter admits its translations are not always 100% accurate. For example, the
English version of the last tweet posted by former President Morsi ended with a word
starting with the letters d-a-k-h-l-i-h-o-a, which neither made any sense nor appeared in
any dictionary. Twitter describes its translation service as an "experiment".
