The Arab world, running from Rabat to Baghdad, like everyone else, likes to webs
ID: 466952 • Letter: T
Question
The Arab world, running from Rabat to Baghdad, like everyone else, likes to websurf. The proportion of Arabs online grew 30-fold between 2000 and 2012. Shaking off their stuffy image, 41% of Saudi internet users are on Twitter, the highest rate in the world. But Arabic speakers have far less content in their native language than others do. By some estimates, less than 1% of all web pages are in Arabic. Back in the early days, this was because the internet could only support Roman scripts, so Arabic-speakers had to transliterate into a web language using a combination of letters and numerals. But by the late 1990s that had been fixed. In 2000 Maktoob, an Arabic internet-services firm founded in Jordan but now owned by Yahoo, launched the first Arabic e-mail. Facebook added an Arabic-language interface in 2009. But content in the world’s fifth-most-spoken tongue is still patchy, as is quality. Searches in Arabic often lead you to a forum rather than a well-designed website. The reasons for Arabic’s lag in generating Internet content are many, including all of the following except for:
More Arabs go online yet their growing enthusiasm for creating Arabic content cannot overcome Arabic-speakers’ passive acceptance of their “second-class experience of the internet.”
For international companies operating in the Middle East, English is an easy lingua franca that enables them to communicate effectively both locally and globally.
For international companies, Internet content to access the faster growing, larger Chinese- or Spanish-speaking markets are a higher priority than the comparatively poorer, underdeveloped markets of the Arab world.
Even in the Middle East, Arabic is not always the number one choice. Arab bloggers frequently chose to write in English to reach a bigger audience abroad or to try to evade censors at home.
Explanation / Answer
All the given options are reason for lack of onlne content in Arabic than the reason that more Arabs go online yet their growing enthusiasm for creating Arabic content cannot overcome Arabic-speakers’ passive acceptance of their “second-class experience of the internet.” As more Arabs go online (and get richer), enthusiasm for creating Arabic content is rising. Beirut and Amman have become regional tech hubs
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