Thursday, December 13, 2007

Yamli, Transliterator to Search Arabic Pages

Yamli.com is a search engine front-end where you can search the Arabic-language web, but using Latin letters... which are then dynamically transliterated into Arabic, and forwarded to a Google search. Ramibotros, who pointed this out in the forum, explains:

When we, arabic-speaking tounges , mail/sms/chat together, we often prefer to write how the arabic word would sound like but in latin words (pronouncation rules often following English rules), which is called transliteration i think. We also represent pronouncations exclusive to the arabic tounge using numbers such as 2, 7 , etc..

Wikipedia explains more. Ramibotros adds:

I always thought Google needed such a tool because:

1) For some, it is much more convenient to search using the latin characters. And sometimes one is even stuck with a keyboard with arabic characters.
2) A lot of webpages are _written_ in the transliterated form already, which is worth being indexed and found – perhaps through converting them.
3) It would be useful for an arabic query to be searched for using BOTH forms ..

[Thanks Ramibotros!]

Yamli, Transliterator to ... by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (2+7)

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