Arabeyes Technical Dictionary

[Youssef CHAHIBI <chahibi at gmail dot com>]

السلام عليكم و رحمة الله،

	One of the main problems of arabization is the lack of a complete technical 
dictionary. As you may notice, our existing translation effort lacks many 
quality norms, including grammar and spelling errors, lack of consistency 
between the different project', no standardization of some problematic arabic 
rules, literal translation, poor quality of style and excessive number of 
equivalent for the same term. In short words: Everything to make the arab 
user steer away the arab desktop.
	In the past of Arabeyes, it was suggested to create a "Quality Assurance 
Committee" or QAC ( Google: site:lists.arabeyes.org QAC). The projects main 
goals were: Standardization of Arabic translations of interfaces, documents, 
etc. ,Review of the quality of translations and Arabic documentation and The 
settings of procedures to follow to attain goals as the committee sees fit 
(wiki.arabeyes.org/QAC). Unfortunately, the project didn't succeed at all 
until now. It is sure that the QAC idea is very crucial to Arabeyes, and 
that's why we can't go any further without reviving it.

	I think that the first thing to do is to create a unified dictionary. Unlike 
the QAC terms (http://cvs.arabeyes.org/viewcvs/translate/misc/), this should 
be a detailed dictionary and glossary. It should include: The english term, 
the arabic equivalent, definitions in Arabic and English, suggestions and 
reasons to adopt this equivalent. It should also be divided into categories 
(For example, Office, System, Multimedia ...) to put the word in its context 
and to work category by category.
	The reasons why I propose to make it very detailled are to convince, and to 
propose it to the ALECSO/Bureau of coordination of arabization as a 
complement or correction to their existing dictionary 
( www.arabization.org.ma ) as suggested by Youcef 
(http://lists.arabeyes.org/archives/doc/2005/March/msg00040.html). I'd try to 
contact them either directly or via the EMI (www.emi.ac.ma) as they were 
effective participants in their project. So not only we will solve a big 
Arabeyes issue, we will also be setting standards إن شاء الله - in oppostion 
to Microsoft which is kind of copyrighting its glossary,- and as well, 
proposing a physical use of this dictionary via open source arabization. We 
might also add french to it like the ALECSO's dictionary.

	What do you think?