Arabic & Middle East
research notes

with gratitude to Anne Alexander, BBC Monitoring

Arabic names
Is it Osama or Usamah, Bin Laden or Ben Ladin? Is it Yasser Arafat or Yassir Arafat? Jamal Adl-alNasir is known as Nasser here and Gamal Abd al-Nasser or Jamal Abdulnasir elsewhere!

Searching for Arabic names can be a nightmare - some sites use various spellings on the same page!!! ! 

Countries such as Morocco , Tunisia and Algeria use the French transliteration system. Amine Gemayel is more common than Amin al-Jumayyil

You can overcome these difficulties by using the Boolean operator "OR" between the spellings in your Google search.

Translation
There is often no direct translation for job titles, military rank or organisations.

"Al-tajammu al-yamani lil islah" could be translated as

• "Yemeni Alliance for Reform"

• "Yemeni Reform Gathering"

• "Yemeni Congregation for Reform" or, from their own website  

• "Yemeni Islah Party"

A limited Arabic text translator is available at http://www.cimos.com/TradNet.htm

Searching for Arabic terms

You can use these aspects to your advantage. Searching for "Hammas" will bring you loads of general news sites about that group. Searching for "Islamic Resistance Movement" (their proper name) will bring you more in-depth sites.

Older Arabic sites use unsearchable GIF images for Arabic text.

Some sites use a mixture of languages - for example, the "Guardians of the Ceders" site has PDF documents in Arabic, whilst the web page itself is in English.

Web page titles are likely to be in English - even if the rest of the site is in Arabic. You can use Arabic language search engines like Ayna to enter Arabic text. These have limited indices so, you may be stuck using Google (which is quite good, even with Arabic text).

Because of lack of resources, some countries have amateur looking websites - even some Government Departments. For example, the Yemeni Information Ministry www.yemeninfo.gov.ye/ENGLISH/home.htm

Middle Eastern Domains
Some countries, such as Sudan, Syria & Iraq have a country code but don't use it. Other countries might use the following....