[jveritas]

Being originally a native of Lebanon, born and lived there for twenty two years, translation from Arabic to English is a simple thing to do for me :)

PS: All the documents that I have translated so far are handwritten ones and I think there is not a software in the world that can possibly do the translation of a handwritten Arabic document.

[usmcobra]

It's possible to translate a hand written Arabic document if the software has been written to "read" the document and turn it into Arabic text. There are programs that do this with the various alphabets as well as Japanese and Chinese letters.

I would just like to help, thank you for your valuable time.

[Txsleuth]

I just heard a Fox News break with Donna Fiducia...and I heard her say something about documents being found that proved the Iraq didn't have any WMDs..or something like that.

Do you know what she was referring to?

[El Gato]

Is the language used sufficiently simple or at a low enough "reading level" that the documents could be scanned by those with only basic Arabic language skills? I'm thinking of using trainees at the Defense Language Institute in Monterrey California to "sift" through the mass of documents, turning over the "good stuff" to more experienced people, even native speakers such as yourself.

PS: All the documents that I have translated so far are handwritten ones and I think there is not a software in the world that can possibly do the translation of a handwritten Arabic document.

Actually it might be easier than doing it to most European languages. Looking at the documents, it appears that even in handwritten documents, the characters are distinct. More like hand printed English (or other Latin alphabet language) rather than a written (i.e. cursive) text using the Latin alphabet. This would Kiley make optical character recognition easier. Then it's a matter of parsing the characters into words and then translating the words. I don't know how hard it is to translate Arabic words and sentences into English words and sentences. I'm sure the result of such a machine translation would be rough, but it would certainly be good enough to then employ English speakers to screen the documents. Or you could translate to Spanish, which is probably closer in structure to Arabic than other European languages, and use the many Spanish speakers we have in the US to do the screening. Maybe even translate it to Hebrew, which is probably much closer to Arabic in structure, and let a bunch of Jews and other Hebrew readers translate it. There would be a certain poetic justice in that, don't you think?

[Elyse]

I think it should be stressed that it has been stated in the media that jveritas' document translations have been verified to be correct translations by the media's translation experts. You can be assured that jveritas is meticulous in his translation because he knows it has to stand up to media scrutiny.