Almost every Arabic speaking person I know does this; they write Arabic words using English letters. When chatting, SMSing or even blogging.
That’s somewhat normal, since they’ve memorized the English keyboard by heart. The problem is, some of the letters in the Arabic alphabet are missing in English, and therefore people have replaced these with numbers and combinations of numbers and letters.
For example, the Arabic letter ‘ع’ is replaced with the number ‘3’. And the letter ‘ء’ with ‘2’. Which makes the name ‘علاء’ in Arabic translate to ‘3ala2’ in English literals.
If anything, this makes reading very difficult.
Introducing Maren, Microsoft Egypt’s solution to the problem! Watch the video on the site and you’ll understand…
Download it here.
Links:
http://www.getmaren.com