Facebook Launches In Middle-Eastern Language
Amit Chowdhry | Wednesday March 11, 2009 | 638 views| Add a CommentMark Zuckerberg’s massive social network has officially launched in Arabic. This makes it easier for those in Arabian to jump on the social network bandwagon. Here is a breakdown of the numbers of users that they have in Middle-Eastern regions:
Egypt: about 900,000 users
Saudi Arabia: about 250,000 users
Lebanon: about 300,000 users
“It’s the first time Arabic speakers will be able to use Facebook in their own language,” stated Facebook director of localization Ghassan Haddad. “It’s potentially huge.”
About 850 Arabic speakers on Facebook helped contribute to the translation of the social network in their mother tongue.
“Design is another challenge, since a web page laid out from right to left looks like a mirror image of an equivalent English page. All components on the page must be changed for right-to-left languages including text alignment, ordering of tabs on pages, different fields on forms, labels, buttons and much more,” added Haddad, who was born in Lebanon.
[via Facebook Blog]
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