Facebook Now Available in Arabic and Hebrew, Reading Right to Left
Facebook, now live in over 40 languages with over 60 more in the process of user translation, today officially launched in Arabic and Hebrew – two languages in which writing begins on the right side of the page and ends on the left.
It’s an impressive technical accomplishment, because many elements of the Facebook site had to be reworked to account for all the linguistic differences. As Facebook’s Ghassan Haddad writes,
For example, with right-to-left languages some of the characters, mainly punctuation marks and numbers, are the same as those used in left-to-right languages like English. The mix of characters between languages written in different directions makes it difficult at times for Web applications to determine the correct direction in which to display the language. Design is another challenge, since a Web page laid out from right to left looks like a mirror image of an equivalent English page. All components on the page must be changed, including text alignment, ordering of tabs on pages, different fields on forms, labels, buttons and much more.
For more details on the challenges of translating into Arabic Hebrew, read the read of Haddad’s blog post.
March 11th, 2009 at 2:15 pm
[...] Inside Facebook, All Facebook, TheNextWeb.com and Mashable! [...]
March 14th, 2009 at 10:54 pm
Hope my native Language Sinhala also available in Facebook near future.
Amal
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April 27th, 2009 at 10:06 am
ارير فيس بوك
May 22nd, 2009 at 6:22 pm
[...] Facebook Now Available in Arabic and Hebrew, Reading Right to Left (insidefacebook.com) [...]
June 10th, 2009 at 1:36 pm
[...] Facebook has made great strides in language localization. In March, Facebook announced that the site was available in Arabic, one of the official languages in Iraq. What’s interesting about this particular translation [...]
October 16th, 2009 at 6:01 am
[...] relevant to many people in Middle Eastern countries this past spring, when the company introduced Arabic and Hebrew versions of the site. Since then, Facebook has gained most of its 10.7 million users in the region, including nearly [...]
July 28th, 2010 at 6:12 am
اني علي من العراق احب اتعرف على بنت اتعرف عليه ونتزوج ونكون في بيت واحد ونعيش في سلام
مع شكر وتقدير