Taghreedat: Enriching Arabic Content on the Web

Earlier this year, I went to a one-day Tweet-up in Doha organized by a group called Taghreedat. I’ve never heard of them before, but I my cousin, who is from Qatar, told me about them and urged me to attend their conference.

I was really impressed at how a group of young Arabs worked together for one simple initiative: enriching Arabic content on the Internet.  With more than 2,500 volunteers from the Arab world, Tahgreedat was able to work with sites like Google, Twitter, Khan Academy, Storify, and Ted Talks by either translating their content or producing Arabic site interfaces for them

During my lecture on open source and the many to many aspect of the Web, where all of us can work together to produce something or improve it, I decided to contact Taghreedaat and see if I can have my students help out with some of their ongoing projects.  I spoke with Mr. Samy Almubarak from Tagrheedat and he was gracious enough to give me a list of all their projects. I chose to have my students translate videos from Khan Academy, which is basically a free online school that provides educational videos “to anyone  anywhere”.

I had my students choose two videos from that site, translate them, and blog about their experience. The translating part was definitely not easy, but it always feels good when you know you did something that would benefit and help a lot of people around the world.

These are the two videos:

• Poussin, Lanscape with St. John
• China Bodhisattva

Thanks Khan Academy for providing free educational content for us and thanks Taghreedat for allowing us to be part of your team.