At a time when Arabic has become the fifth language adopted for domain names after English, French, Chinese and Japanese, the Arab world still seems to suffer a visible lack of site names on the internet, which some attribute to poor quality of content, design, theft of some material and a lack of financing.
Yet Talal Abu-Ghazaleh, Vice Chair of the technology committee at the UN, strongly denied this in a conversation with “Communications Today”, during his participation at the Egypt Arab Economic Forum that concluded recently in Cairo.
Mr. Abu-Ghazaleh stressed that there is an international committee called the Multilingual Internet Names Consortium (MINC), which is currently working to introduce Arabic as an official language for internet domain names, in addition to four other languages. He explained that computers deal in the language of zeroes and ones and since it is difficult to communicate in this manner, these digits are translated into various languages. During the upcoming period, chatting, the exchange of information and directly entering databases will all take place in the Arabic language, according to Abu-Ghazaleh.
He added that the way to overcome the digital gap is to establish the infrastructure which means simplifying methods of communication for every citizen and putting the necessary laws and legislations in place. The second way to overcome this divide is education, as he stated: “I’ve recently been elected to chair the taskforce that will develop education and capacity-building at the UN. Three committees have been formed, with one headed by UNESCO to develop educational programs, the second is headed by the World Health Organization and will use IT in the health field, and the third committee is to develop Arab content on the internet necessary for education.”
He pointed out that the only way to increase Arab capabilities on the internet is to focus on Arabic language usage with internet users. He added that 50% of internet surfers today are Americans, and in 2006 50% of the users will be Chinese, because the Chinese have been able to include the Chinese language in the internet and develop a system where surfers can use the internet in Chinese easily.
While some people claim that the scarcity of Arab domains is due to Arabic being the only language that is written from right to left, Abu-Ghazaleh refuted this stating that Chinese is written from top to bottom. Therefore, this is not an indicator per Abu-Ghazaleh, as he elaborated again on the fact that computer language is simply digits that are translated into languages with no fixed methodology of writing them.
He added: “We must begin by changing our culture and priorities. If I want to present a gift to my grandson these days for example, it won’t be a bicycle but rather a computer. This is because if we don’t become part of the knowledge revolution we will be outsiders to this world. In the past, we may have had a choice on whether to join the industrial world or convert to agriculture, yet now, we don’t have a choice. We either enter the era of knowledge or stay isolated from the rest of the world.”