Yahoo! signs up Arabic transliteration service

Internet giant Yahoo! has signed a deal to acquire a license to Arabic transliteration service Yamli as the firm looks to increase its user base across the Arab world. The search engine provider said Yamli will be rolled out across all of its services, including instant messenger, email and search engine, over the next few months. “We’ll be integrating that technology deeply with our products and services at Yahoo! Maktoob. It will enable transliteration capabilities in various communications and media platforms,” Ahmed Nassef, vice president and managing director at regional operation Yahoo! Maktoob, told reporters on Monday. The service will also help boost Arabic language content available online, he added. “Even though there are a lot of users out there who speak Arabic and who want to consume content in the Arabic language, less than 2 percent of the content that is out there online is in Arabic. Implementing technologies like Yamli will grow the quality Arabic content out there.” Yahoo! declined to give a value for the deal. Yamli, founded in 2007 by Lebanese entrepreneurs Habib Haddad and Imad Jureidini, enables users to type Arabic without an Arabic keyboard. The real-time transliteration engine converts words typed in Latin characters to their Arabic equivalent. The service, which will be called 3arrebni - or Arabise me - on Yahoo!, currently translates 150m words per month. The acquisition marks a change in direction for Yamli, said co-founder Habib Haddad. “We’ve been in the consumer play since we launched and our goal was to monetise through advertising, [but] as a small company we weren’t able to do that successfully,” he said. “We’ve been in that [licensing] space for a while - Yahoo!’s deal marks a milestone for that.” Yahoo is looking to grow its users in the Middle East and North Africa as it struggles to keep users in more developed markets. In terms of internet search engine users, Yahoo! is a distant second to market leader Google. In April, the company announced that it would be laying off 2,000 employees, or 14 percent of its global workforce in a bid to save US$236m in costs per year. When contacted by Arabian Business at the time, Yahoo! Maktoob declined to provide details on how the staff cuts would impact the company regionally. A month later, Yahoo!\'s recently appointed global CEO Scott Thompson resigned with immediate effect after the company\'s board began investigating a discrepancy in his CV. The search engine acquired Arabic-language internet venture Maktoob.com, the largest portal in the Arab world, for around US$165m in 2009. The move increased its regional reach from 30m users to 56m. From Arabian Business