SakhrSoft, the manufacturers of the software behind the ajeeb.com Web site, are undisputably the experts in machine translation (MT) between Arabic and English. Unfortunately, they don't seem to be very interested in selling software. I've sent two inquiries to their US sales office, and have yet to hear back. Their translation is generally very good, though fraught with typical MT challenges, such as identifying proper names. A standard (and often amusing) test of MT software is to translate, then translate your translation back. The results seldom have the same meaning as the original input, and are often good for a chuckle. -- Greg On Wed, Jan 02, 2002 at 02:29:31PM +0100, Lucky Green wrote:

I didn't see this on the list, though I may have missed the post due to mail server migration issues.

--Lucky Green

-----Original Message----- From: rene@xs4all.nl [mailto:rene@xs4all.nl] Sent: Tuesday, January 01, 2002 3:04 PM To: [elided] Subject: arabic <-> english translation page

Some rogue element at cnn.com posted this on their website.. from now on i'm reading al-jazeera ;-)

http://europe.cnn.com/2001/TECH/ptech/12/31/arabic.software.ap/index.htm l In October, Cairo-based Sakhr Software released its Arabic-to-English translation software -- free for the world to use -- on the company's Arabic language Web portal at Ajeeb.com

http://english.ajeeb.com/ http://edalilc.ajeeb.com/data/66187.asp -> listing of arab news sources http://tarjim.ajeeb.com/ajeeb/Tarjimtrans.asp?ol=1&url=http://www.al-jaz eera.net&lang=1&interface=0&sentence= -> al-jazeera in english