3arabi - Arabic chat to English translator

3arabi Logo

Hi  all,

As some might have noticed, Arabic speakers on the net use a form of writing called ‘Arabic chat‘ or 3arabi, which involves using Latin characters and Hindu-Arabic numerals to write words in Arabic. I wrote a small service called 3arabi that lets you translate this Arabic chat directly to English.

Apparently there are tools to do transliteration (converting Latin letters back to Arabic), and also translation. But nothing that does them both. That is why I wrote a small script that uses Google’s transliteration service and ‘Google Translate’. This does the job, but is not perfect, however, it does actually help me understand some messages.

The source is also available in GitHub (its in python). If anyone contributes better code I’ll merge it back to the service.

• 3arabi translation website
• Here is an example of linking to a translation

Thanks to Ira Abramov for hosting the service!

Thanks to Rajesh who wrote the transliteration API though after using it I moved to the javascript google tool with his help.

Thanks Muhammad Khatib who wrote Google Translate python API and for releasing it.

Enjoy,

Guy

Update: Google seem to be blocking the translation service, thinking its spam, if anyone knows how to contact them and asking them to lift that ban would be appreciated.