Is there any API to get meaning of Arabic words? There are some APIs for English language e.g. WordsAPI, but I'm looking for Arabic language.
I have used Wordnet Library in the past and I think they have support for different languages such as Arabic.
This link might be helpfull Arabic wordnet
I don't think there is API, but you can scrape this website, which provides English to Arabic words meanings. Or you can use the Arabic version just to get the meaning and definition of Arabic words.
Related
I know that Hebrew and Arabic characters are going from right to left but I want to see all of them.
Have a look at the bidirectional character type (Unicode character property Bidi_Class). You're looking for characters of type R (Right-to-Left) or AL (Right-to-Left Arabic). The file DerivedBidiClass.txt in the Unicode database contains a list of all code points with these classes.
Quoting i18nguy:
Languages don't have a direction. Scripts have a writing direction,
and so languages written in a particular script, will be written with
the direction of that script.
Here are some scripts using RTL: Arabic, Hebrew, N'ko, Syriac, Thaana/Thâna, Tifinar, Urdu.
You can just look for unicode range of a given script. Like for example Tifinar: U+2D30 – U+2D7F.
Not sure what you want to achieve by looking at all those characters but I think that is the only way of actually finding them.
You can refer to the original page here:
http://www.i18nguy.com/temp/rtl.html
like the house/home symbol is ⌂, I need the most popular symbol codes for a website, like contact us, about us, home, etc.
Thanks in advance for any help.
The notation ⌂ (which should really include the semicolon) is just a reference to the character with Unicode code number 8962 in decimal. You can use similar notations for all Unicode characters, so the ultimate reference would be the Unicode Standard, and in practice you might want to look at the Code Charts for symbols there. The symbol denoted by ⌂, U+2302 HOUSE, is in the Miscellaneous Technical block.
However, most Unicode characters are not supported by most fonts. The real problem with using special characters like “⌂” is with font support and with users’ difficulties in guessing what you mean by such characters (if the users are lucky enough to see them). This is why images are generally recommended for icon-like symbols.
I developed an app (originally in Korean and English), but I want to add Chinese support.
When I move the Chinese translations from Word to FlashDevelop, though, some characters show up as boxes. When I run the app, they don't show up at all.
Does anyone have experience developing in multiple languages using the same IDE, or preferably, FlashDevelop?
Thanks!
You need to check the file encoding and check if the font you are using support this kind of character. If you use transformation like rotation and alpha, you need to embed your font. For french, I need to convert my file to UFT-8 and embed the font with accentued character.
When developing an application that will need to work with a variety of localizations, particularly with "right to left" text, is there a possibility of a case where numbers would need to be converted to "right to left" as well?
I'm no language scholar, but I know the RTL languages I am familiar with present their numbers in LTR.
For instance (using google translate):
I have 345 apples.
In Arabic:
لدي 345 التفاح.
So, I have two questions:
Is it possible to run into a language that uses RTL numbers?
How should internationalizing be handled in such cases?
or,
Is the "accepted norm" to just do numbers using Western Arabic characters, read from left to right?
In the big right-to-left scripts - Arabic, Hebrew and Thaana - numbers always run left to right. (When I say "Arabic", I refer to all the languages that are written in the Arabic script - Arabic, Farsi, Urdu, Pasto and many others.)
Hebrew and Thaana always use European digits, the same 0-9 set as English. There's nothing much to do there, because Unicode automatically takes care of ordering the numbers correctly. But see the comments about isolation below.
It's possible to use European digits in Arabic, too; for example, the Arabic Wikipedia uses them. However, very frequently Arabic texts use a different set of digits - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Arabic_numerals . It depends on your users' preferences. Notice also, that in the Persian language the digits are slightly different. From the point of view of right-to-left layout they behave pretty much the same way as European digits, although there are slight differences in the behavior of mathematical signs - for example, the minus can go on the other side. There are some subtleties here, but they are mostly edge cases.
In both Hebrew and Arabic you may run into a problem with bidi-isolation. For example, if you have a Hebrew paragraph in which you have an English word, and after the word you have numbers, the numbers will appear to the right of the word, although you may have wanted them to appear on the left. That's how the Unicode bidi algorithm works by default. To resolve such things you can use the Unicode control characters RLM and LRM. If you are using HTML5, you can also use the <bdi> tag for this, as well as the CSS rule "unicode-bidi: isolate". These CSS and HTML5 solutions are quite powerful and elegant, but aren't supported in all browsers yet.
I am aware of one script in which the digits run right-to-left: N'Ko, which is used for some languages of Africa. I actually saw websites written in it, but it is far less common than Hebrew and Arabic.
Finally, if you're using JavaScript, you can use the free jquery.i18n library for automatic number conversion. See https://github.com/wikimedia/jquery.i18n . (Disclaimer: I am one of this library's developers.)
Numbers will generally translate as you have them. Even in languages that read in different directions the Western Arabic numbers are typically recognized by the user.
HTML 5 is introducing a new element: <ruby>; here's the W3C's description:
The ruby element allows one or more spans of phrasing content to be marked with ruby annotations. Ruby annotations are short runs of text presented alongside base text, primarily used in East Asian typography as a guide for pronunciation or to include other annotations. In Japanese, this form of typography is also known as furigana.
They then go on to give a few examples of Ruby annotations in use for Chinese and Japanese text. I'm wondering though: is this element going to be useful only for east-asian HTML documents, or are there good semantic applications for the <ruby> element in other western languages like English, German, Spanish, etc.?
id-ee-oh-SINK-ruh-sees
Could be useful for people learning English, as our writing system has many idiosyncrasies that make it somewhat less than phonetic.
As a linguist, I can see the benefits in using <ruby> for marking up linguistic examples with various theoretical notational conventions. One example that comes to mind is indicating tonal levels in autosegmental phonology. Here's a quick example I threw together that can be seen in the latest Webkit/Chromium (at least):
http://miketaylr.com/code/western_ruby.html
Currently, this type of notation is left for LaTex and friends, and if on the web, generally a non-accessible image.
As I understand it, ruby annotations are not really relevant in Western languages because Western alphabets are (more or less) phonetic. In Japanese they are used to give a pronunciation guide for logographic characters which don't have obvious pronunciations (unless you've memorized them). I suppose the Western analog would be IPA notation in brackets following a word, but those are rarely used and I don't know if Ruby annotations would be appropriate for them.
My list:
theoretical notational conventions (miketylr's answer)http://miketaylr.com/code/western_ruby.html
language learning (Adam Bellaire's answer) id-ee-oh-SINK-ruh-sees foo idiosyncrasies bar - made with ascii 'nbsp' art
abbreviation, acronym, initialism (possibly - why hover?)
learning technical terms of English origin accidentally translated to your non-english native language
I'm often forced to do the latter in uni. While the translated terminology is often consistent, very often it's not at all self-explaining or not as much as the original english one.
Also the same term may have been translated using several translation systems by different authors/groups.
Another problem group is when, for example, queue, row, series (and sometimes tuple) are translated to the very same word in your language.
Given a western language with less users, and the low percentage of technical people in the population, this actually makes learning the topic much easier directly from English and then learn the translations in a second step.
Ruby could be a tool to transform this into a one-step process, providing either the translations or the original as a "Furigana".