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“So, tonight is the big game, my team has finally made it to the finals. I feel like inviting some of my friends over to watch the game together. I fire up my email client and invite them to my place. I note down some additional items in my todo list for tonight’s gathering. At 7:00pm, the game starts, the match is tense and exciting, and... NO NOT AGAIN, a last minute header past the goalie. For the 6th time in a row, my team suffers a loss to his rival. The guys left, I head to my computer, launch my browser, search for the match’s news, the reviews are there, I read the first one, I don’t like the writers bias to the winning team, I leave a flaming comment. I head to Youtube to watch the goal again, I am sure that goal was an offside, yes! It’s true, I leave comment pointing to the exact second in the video where the offside is apparent, and annotate the video. I log in to my IM application, search for that contact who always gets on my nerves in those situations, I block him, now I am looking for someone who cheers for my team. Found, I IM her telling how miserable our team was today. She acknowledges. I log into Facebook, change my status to show sorrow, I tweet the match result and I head to my team's official forum to participate in the heated discussion”
This a real life scenario where communicating in your own language makes all the difference. Expressing your intense feelings of joy or sorrow is better served using your native tongue. Maren helps you communicate efficiently in Arabic if you lack access to an Arabic keyboard or you are not familiar with one.
The fact that Maren is usable across Windows enables a world of possibilities. It now becomes all about you and how you use it. We have heard some unusual stories of people using Maren to rename their folders to Arabic, or to type up that Arabic document that their boss urgently needs.
The above is MY story on how I use Maren, now I want to hear yours. How are you using Maren? What are your favorite scenarios? What kind of problems is Maren solving for you? Are you using it intensely in your chatting sessions or are you mainly using it to submit Arabic queries to your search engine of choice or are you doing an entirely different thing? How can we improve it to even help you more?
Thanks,
Mostafa Ashour
Program Manager @ Microsoft
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Maren converts Romanized Arabic, i.e Arabic text written through Roman characters, into Arabic script as you type. And hence you as a writer/author will be able to send your thoughts in Arabic-script-Arabic instead of Romanized-Arabic, and your recipients will be able to read your text in Arabic, making things more natural. Moreover, if the text you’re writing is expected to reside on the web, you have much bigger chances to appear on the search results than if it were posted in Romanized-Arabic, just by using Maren.
Among the many useful features of Maren, I will cite those I see most appealing. First of all is that it works as part of Windows operating system, and hence it operates seamlessly in most Windows applications and Websites. It generates ranked Arabic candidates as you type, and with a very high accuracy, which means that in most of the cases, the automatically selected “first” candidate will be the intended one, which means minimal interruption overhead on the user. The accuracy rate and response time are consistent across vocabulary (rare vs. frequent words) and across word length (short vs. long words). The conversion to Arabic is real-time as you type, regardless of the complexity of the input word and regardless of the available computational resources in terms of memory or processing power. Maren supports most common abbreviations, it recognizes abbreviations such as ISA, NVM, E7L…etc, and expands them into full Arabic phrases. You don’t need to be online to use Maren, it’s installed on your machine and you can use it anywhere, anytime, and most importantly, your data, conversations and written documents are in full privacy.
Let me give you some useful tips when using Maren:
- If the language bar neither appears in the taskbar nor on the desktop, then it’s hidden and you need to show it. To do that, you need to go to the Control Panel > regional settings > keyboards and Languages > Language bar, and check the “show language bar” box. Once the Language bar is shown, to activate Maren keyboard, you need to select the Arabic(Saudi Arabia) Language, then select Arabic (Microsoft Maren) keyboard.
- On Windows Vista, you have a shortcut key (Ctrl+Shift+Space) to select Maren mode.
- In Rich-Edit-Controls, as in Word, Live Messenger and other chatting applications, and websites, you get best results when using Maren in the right-to-left direction, while in simple edit controls such as in Notepad or in IE Toolbars, you get best results when using it in the left-to-right direction.
- As a rule of thumb, select the orientation (left-to-right or right-to-left) that would better fit your needs, using Ctrl+Shift.
- Type in abbreviations, there is a big chance you get them expanded into the corresponding Arabic phrase, “BRB” , “JAK”, “ISA” ,“TYT” are few examples.
If you have suggestions for new features, want to propose new abbreviations, discover useful tips, or have questions, just let us know, we’ll be more than happy to answer you.
Enjoy...
Achraf Chalabi
Cairo Microsoft Innovation Center (CMIC)
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Saba7 El 7'eir
At some point back in the early nineties seeing the above words on a PC screen would have caused me to stop and worry I might have a file corruption. Today, I see such Romanized Arabic words everyday on TV, on my PC or mobile, on advertising billboards and I even once spotted it printed on a guy’s t-shirt but I was too slow to read what it said before he whisked away.
Luckily none of these sightings inspire fears of file corruption anymore although some would argue there's a dangerous element of corruption at play (cultural not digital) and would quickly point fingers at the poor guy with the t-shirt. That is an interesting debate and deserves to be the sole subject of a later post. Today, I'd like to talk about the phenomena of Romanized Arabic and the release of Microsoft Maren.
I found it difficult to pin point when I began seeing and using Romanized Arabic. It definitely wasn't around the days of Gopher or Mosaic. I don't remember using it in ICQ or IRC. If you haven't heard of any of these and you are not an internet historian you need not bother look them up.
Consensus seems to be that the wide use of Romanized Arabic on the internet and in phones started in the mid 1990s. The concept of Romanization, the use of the roman (latin) alphabet to represent the words of another language has been around for much longer and has been applied to many languages.
Pinyin, for example, is a popular romanization form of Mandarin. Unlike the grass roots origin of the widely used Romanized Arabic, Pinyin was developed by a Chinese government committee in the 1950s. Pinyin is officially recognized as an international standard and is widely supported (e.g. Windows supports text input and automatic transliteration of Pinyin).
Support for Romanized Arabic on the internet has also emerged in the past couple of years. Onkosh, Yamli and Google have all offered web-based implementations.
Today, with the release of Maren, Microsoft offers a solution that integrates seamlessly with Windows. Typing in Romanized Arabic is no longer restricted to a particular web page or browser. You can now easily do this in the applications that you use every day, on the web or the desktop.
Email or IM a friend. Comment on a photo. Search the web. Write a document. Blog. Keep a to do list. Maren makes it easier to complete many day to day tasks in Arabic and using the applications you use today for accomplishing these tasks.
Use it, let us know what you think about Maren or Romanized Arabic as a phenomena.
salam,
ahmed el-shimi,
Cairo Microsoft Innovation Center (CMIC)
