StartUpArabia

Mohamed Marwen Meddah | July 27, 2010 | View Comments

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Dakwak is a new startup that was recently launched from Jordan that aims to provide a solution for website localization into 60+ languages.

The site makes it easy for webmasters to integrate Dakwak’s localization and translation service right into their sites; instantly providing their visitors access to content in the language they’re most comfortable reading in.

All it takes is a bit of javascript code that needs to be integrated into the site pages, and to flag the content that needs to be localized/translated; and the rest is taken care of by Dakwak.

The service automatically detects the country a visitor is connecting from based on their IP address, and changes the language of the content to the visitor’s language, switching all the text without breaking the design of the page; unless the visitor chooses to switch back to the base language.

As for how the localization and translation happens exactly; it’s a combination of two approaches:

Crowd-sourced translation: Just like the approach followed by Facebook and a number of other sites, the site owner can rely on the user community to help translate the site to other languages. Of course, the site owner can choose who they want to be able to contribute and can moderate the community translations.

Automatic machine translation: Dakwak uses both the Google language and translation APIs as well as its own translation engine to provide automatic machine translations of content that hasn’t been translated by the community yet. The Dakwak translation engine is also built to learn better translations as site owners and community members get more involved in translation.

Webmasters also get to choose which languages to provide on their sites through their site settings on Dakwak.

People interested in contributing to translations and localizations of sites can also find a list of all open projects on the site itself, where they can vote on existing translations, flag the ones they think are inappropriate, or suggest new ones.

Dakwak was launched from Amman, Jordan by Waheed Barghouthi; who counts among his previous projects the work he did on building Watwet, the Arabic micro-blogging platform.