Yamli Arabic search tool in the news again
Written By: daveski on December 16, 2008
3 Comments
TechCrunch ran a story yesterday about the Massachusetts-based startup Yamli, saying that they’re solidifying their position as a major player in the Arabic search world. (I posted previously on them here).
Apparently what they’ve done now is to allow for an automatic search for phonetically similar words with different spellings…Any users out there who can report on how this works?
I’m really curious about how other languages are inputted using the same keyboard, as I was asking Usree with regard to Hindi and Bengali a few days ago.
Hmm, now I’m wondering if the keyboard is ‘the same’ after all if it’s used to write in different languages? Check out the video…
Tags: Arabic, input, search engines
“Bengali” –> “Bangla”
eh?
oh!
Okay so the only major problem that I have with this is that you have to already know how to say the words in Arabic in order to translate them properly into Arabic text. For example I typed in God is Great and got the Arabic script each of the “g” words begin in Arabic script with the letter “Ghain”. However in Arabic, the way to say God is Great is Allahu Akbar. Each of these words begins with the letter “Alif”. So typing English into Arabic isn’t really transliteration because Arabic uses different words. I have to say though that it is cool to type in Arabic. So I suggest if one uses this and doesn’t speak or read Arabic that they should write the English translation (of course this means the Arabic would have a completely different meaning or no meaning at all).