Recent military developments, news of USA & UK prisoners of war and the heightened activity of the Arab media has caused an avalanche of non-Arabic speaking Internet users to browse the content of Arabic sites through Ajeeb.com
Dubai, United Arab Emirates, 30 March 2003:
Ten days into the Third Gulf War, Ajeeb.com, the only Arabic web portal on the Internet to offer Arabic to English translation services, (http://tarjim.ajeeb.com), announces that the number of hits and of visitors using its services, has reached record heights, exceeding those achieved after the 9.11 events, and surpassing record hits achieved in 2002.
In Dubai, Anwar Diab, General Manager of E-Link Associates, commented: "During the period directly after the 9.11 events, the translation engine offered free English to Arabic translations. However, what makes the translation engine even more unique is that it now offers the additional feature of Arabic to English translations as well."
Ajeeb.com is a website run by E-Link Associates, a company located in Boston, USA, and powered by the technologies of Sakhr Software Co., a company renown in the Arab world. Ajeeb.com offers its users a translation engine built by Sakhr, which offers translation services both to and from Arabic and English.
Diab added: "The number of translation requests in both directions exceeded the daily average after President Bush issued his warning to the Iraqi leader around the middle of this month. This is unusual at this time of year. As the conflict intensified around the 23 & 24 of March, and with the news of USA prisoners being captured by Iraqi forces, the number of hits reached new heights, well beyond our expectations. Additionally, as of Thursday 27 March 2003, this service has achieved broken new records, surpassing all figures achieved last year. To date, we have noticed that these figures are continually on the increase, moment by moment."
The previous record usage of the Arabic to English translation services was achieved on 11.9.2002, the first anniversary of the Twin Towers attack in New York. These figures exceeded 50,000 translation requests a day, and 650,000 English to Arabic translation requests a day at the beginning of July 2002.
Diab added that: "Aljazeera.net is considered the most appealing website for Ajeeb.com's foreign visitors, as over 95% of them browse Aljazeera.net in English by using the services offered by our website. This continues to be the case despite the hitches which Aljazeera.net has recently faced. While other visitors make use of this free service to translate various other news and religious sites on the Internet."
In addition to news and dynamic sites, Ajeeb.com portal offers the largest directory of Arabic websites on the Internet, as well as a search engine and Johaina, the first service in the Arab World to gather and categorize news items published daily on the Internet. Ajeeb.com also includes a collection of multi-lingual dictionaries and free services such as the TV Guide, weather reports, classifieds, horoscopes, cartoons and email.
As for Ajeeb.com's readiness for this increase in users, Anwar Diab declared that Ajeeb servers are capable of receiving over 2 million translation requests a day, that is three times the present level of translation requests. He added that the traffic overload some services may face at times does not deter users from returning to complete a translation.
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About Ajeeb
Ajeeb.com, the leading Arab portal on the Net, offers a wealth of information on the Middle East in both the Arabic and English languages. Based on cutting-edge technologies from Sakhr, the portal offers users a host of unique and free services, including English to Arabic machine translation for text in any format, a comprehensive directory of regional Web sites, a powerful Web search engine and the first service of its kind in the region to monitor and aggregate news and other dynamic information on the Web.
Other services include a selection of online dictionaries for bi-directional translation in five languages, as well as weather forecasts, ‘today in history’ highlights, prayer times, daily caricatures, horoscopes, e-mail and classified ads.
Ajeeb.com hosts a variety of channels with daily updates including news, information technology and the Internet, women’s affairs, shopping, bulletin boards and quick polls. The content is further supported by an encyclopedia of Arabic cinema, literary and Islamic software and a wide selection of games.
© Press Release 2003
