Smooth sailing in troubled waters

The clash of civilisations may be upon us, writes Mukul Devichand, but one Cairo-based Web site is opening up a profitable chink of light in our suspicious world
"Technology that understands Arabic, that is our vision," enthuses a bright-eyed and bespectacled Salah Malaeb, general manager of Sakhr software.
Malaeb is excited, and with good reason. He is the head of one of the few IT firms to defy both Egypt's economic downturn and the predicted end of the dot.com revolution. Into the bargain, Sakhr's Web venture ajeeb.com is being portrayed by the international Web community as something of a force for good against the tide of the clash of civilisations of the post-11 September world.
The haste with which Washington blamed Islamic fundamentalist groups for 9/11 and the climate of paranoia between the West and the Arab world has hit Egypt hard, as tourists cancel tickets and the world economy tumbles. Ajeeb.com, however, is widely being seen as a way to bridge the growing chasm between civilisations. Ajeeb ('wow!' in Arabic) has a special trump card to play in the new global reality. It offers Web users the only way currently available to translate Arabic-language Web sites into English, and English to Arabic, in real time.
For Malaeb, this live translation between the languages is nothing short of a worthy cause. "We are opening up the wider world for Arabs, and now we are beginning to do the same for outsiders looking into the Arab world," he happily told me from behind his massive desk in Nasser City's sprawling free zone.
Ajeeb's idealistic vision is translating into hard cash, despite the economic downturn. Sakhr has managed to keep a growth rate of 10% throughout the crisis. "We are growing exponentially," he said.
The events of 11 September and the war that followed created an instant demand for information, he told me. Arabs, shocked by the attacks and frightened that they would soon be the targets of a vengeful US administration, flocked to the Internet to check US news sources. On the other side of the divide, Westerners rushed to access better informed Arabic-language news sites like aljazeera.net and tried to work out Arab thinking -- something that their own news media failed to deliver to them.
Both types of cross-civilisational traffic provided a huge surge in demand for Ajeeb's translation services.
"On 11 September itself and in the two weeks following, we had to double our capacity and we suffered from severe overloads," recounts the Lebanese Malaeb. "We had only just launched our English-to-Arabic service, and had never expected 50 million page views and the 100,000 translation requests we were handling every day." Westerners accessed Arabic news sites in their droves, each time using Ajeeb as their window onto the Arab world. The most popular sites were the Qatari Al-Jazeera Web site, London-based Arabic newspaper Al-Hayat and the Arabic version of Egypt's semi-official Al- Ahram, in that order.
Despite this, Ajeeb's main preoccupation -- and the main source of its business -- is with Arabic-language users. After 11 September, requests for English to Arabic translation shot up to a total of half a million daily. I asked Malaeb why there is such phenomenal demand for Web translation from within the Arab world. He smiled as if he had expected the question. "There are a lot of Arabs around," he said. "Let's say that maybe 80 per cent of them don't speak English, but very many of them are educated. What they really want is to see the English- language content that makes up most of the worldwide Web. With our technology, they can."
Ajeeb has been one of few recent on-line success stories in the Arab world. What's the secret of its success? Malaeb thinks it is something to do with research and development. "I used to work in Italy," he recalls. "When I wanted to work on a project, I simply applied for European Union funding. But I am not aware of any Arab government which funds Web research." Sakhr, part of the giant Gulf-owned technology group Al- Alamia, was able to invest purely for the Arab market. "Usually, Arab firms localise global-oriented technologies or simply allow foreign firms to supply technology. But at Sakhr, we wanted to reflect our Arab-ness." Sakhr was one of the few with the resources to do this, and set a team of 100 software engineers to work at its Nasser City HQ.
Another reason for Ajeeb's success, says Malaeb, is its pan- Arab world ambitions. By looking beyond Egypt's borders, Sakhr is tapping an enormous and, as yet, unsaturated market. Only a fifth of Sakhr's business comes from North Africa including Egypt. Saudi Arabia makes up almost twice this volume, with much of the rest coming from the Gulf. "My market is not Egypt," says Malaeb. "It is the whole Arab world."
Another reason that Sakhr is weathering the economic storm, said Malaeb, is that its translation technology is now heavily in demand from government intelligence agencies on both sides of the suspicious divide. "Nowadays Western governments want our technology to translate Arabic files en masse, and Arab governments want the same for English," said Malaeb. In other words, Sakhr is writing software tools for the new generation of spooks in our redefined reality.
Ajeeb is available free for now, but it will not stay that way, said Malaeb. "It is free now because we wanted to showcase our technologies and are educating the market," he said. "Eventually we will charge, probably by an annual subscription." He hastened to add that it would be "very affordable."
Signing up to Ajeeb, I decided to go straight to Al-Jazeera's site. The translations I received ranged from the vaguely intelligible ("OPEC and the independent one they head for a truce that saves oil prices") to the downright confusing ("Israel declares murder twos of the Jordanian attack outlets").
Malaeb admitted that tarjim was imperfect. "In the end, of course, it is a machine doing the translation. But we are translating at 75 per cent accuracy now, compared to 60 per cent a year ago. We will soon reach 80 per cent. Even real flesh and blood translators might only reach 90 per cent accuracy," he told me.
Ajeeb's imperfect translations have been good enough to get the site noticed by the international Web community, however. "Users are learning to live with a little weird grammar," reported international cyber-magazine Wired last month. "Ajeeb's error-prone technology known as machine translation has played a key part in speeding the exchange of information between the English-speaking world and the Middle East."
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