Software Business in the Middle East

Just got news about the visit of Bill Gates to United Arab Emirates in January 2008. The chairman of Microsoft will participate in Government Leaders Forum organized by Microsoft for the government organizations to encourage the decision makers to use technologies – I guess the technologies from Microsoft.

Looking at Healthcare, .Net and SQL Server are widely used in hospitals, clinics and pharmacies in United Arab Emirates. In Saudi Arabia it’s another story – any hospital I’ve seen run on Oracle.

Link to original news.

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Time to time I get questions about software localization into Arabic language before starting marketing and sales in the Middle East, and if it makes any sense at all . I would better put my thoughts on it in this post.

First of all, you would differentiate United Arab Emirates from other Arabic countries. I guess UAE is the only Arabic country where 85% of residents are expats who will never be citizens of the country. As a result, the commonly used language everywhere is English although the official language is Arabic of course.

It is another story in Saudi Arabia. The majority of population there are locals, but still I have met only couple people there who didn’t feel comfortable speaking English. In all other cases I have never had any problems speaking English on the meetings or over the phone.

It is not so often I see a Web site in Arabic – but I guess it’s because I do not have Arabic language installed on my computer so I get English page by default. Another reason I do not often see Arabic language on the Web is because I am mainly interested in IT and Healthcare where English is kind of de facto standard language.

As a result, I see no reason to translate our software into Arabic – all doctors and pharmacists speak English, and their major books are written in English too. Several times we got requests from our customers to add patient counselling leaflets in Arabic. When patient comes to a pharmacy, he gets medications together with the print out of instructions on how to administer those medications. In this case pharmacist would have a choice to print out the leaflet either in English or Arabic.

Another example – our partner for software development in Egypt. They have several major products like Point of Sale for small groceries, small rental cars agencies and so on. Arabic language support is essential for them because they sell only in Arabic countries and you might have hard time finding people in those small firms speaking good English. And also, since our partner company is owned by Arabs and Arabs are working there, the support of Arabic language is natural thing for them.

Localization into Arabic might be technically difficult because they write from right to left. It means all your controls would know how to present Arabic text correctly, all the labels would jump over to another side of your text boxes and icons would be able to change their positions too.

So what’s the conclusion? If your software is for the niche where English is widely used, then I don’t think you would need to localize it – at least localization would not be in your priority one list. But if you have software for housewives who might have troubles with English then probably you would consider localization pretty seriously.

In a common case I would start localization from a product’s Web site, or at least from having couple pages in Arabic that describe the product. When it’s done you might use Google AdSense in Arabic to promote your product in this region. Later your customers will let you know if they want to have Arabic version of your product. Otherwise it’s way too easy to spend a lot of time and money for localization and do not get enough sales to even cover your expenses.

There is at least one thing you would do before you start sales of your product in the Middle East – check with your translation agency if your product name doesn’t mean anything bad in Arabic. Otherwise you might end up with the situation when you have your product called “Pajero” that in translation might mean “Wanker”.

Dialects in Arabic

Finally, a lit bit more about dialects in Arabic language. There are several major groups of dialects. Sometimes people speaking one dialect cannot understand people speaking in another dialect of Arabic. But the most important thing for software is that dialects are used only in speaking, not in writing, so written Arabic is the same everywhere. It means you have to translate your product to Arabic only once avoiding translation to all widely used dialects.

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This is another post about the trip from Sweden to China by bicycle. All posts about the trip might be found on this link.

Translation from Swedish in free style. The original post is here. Pictures related to this post are stored on this link.

The map of the passed distance described in this post might be found here.

During the last week the cyclists got two new stamps in their passports – one on the boarder between Poland – Slovakia, and then on the boarder Slovakia – Hungary.

Day 18. Krakow.

At 8 am guys went to the bus station to go to Oswiecim that is sadly known for its Auschwitz concentration camp. The place is ruthful and you become depressed at what you see there.

Day 19. Krakow.

The cyclists changed their hostel and immediately came to the company for other people from many different countries. The environment was really friendly, so they had nice evening chatting with other hostel’s guests in the hall. The most impressive was one aged couple who became a real prove that age is not the reason to stay at home.

Day 20. Krakow – Wieliczka. 20 km.

Guys left their hostel and went to Wieliczka to visit their famous Salt Mine that is under protection of UNESCO. The descent is about 378 stairs down and 135 meters long. The view was beautiful. They spent couple hours downstairs , but this time was really not enough to have a look even at 2% of the entire Mine.

Day 21. Wieliczka – Rabka. 50 km.

They waked up from pleasant sound of rain drops falling on the tent and started the race toward Tatra Mountains. The road had a lot of rises, and finally guys came up to extra 400 meters above the sea level. In the evening they stayed overnight at a family in city Rabka in their house with wood stove. The family showed hospitality to the guys who enjoyed the whole stream of nice stuff like bread with homemade marmalade, tea and plum liquor.

Day 22. Rabka – Orovski (Slovakia). 80 km.

The cyclists passed pretty many hills until they arrived at the border between Poland and Slovakia, from where they could see the mountain tops covered by snow on the horizon for the first time during this trip. Last Polish money was spent at the gas station to buy some chocolate.

That was the first stamp in their passports since they sat at their bicycles back in Sweden.

The first dozen kilometers the road was very good – just downhill and flat road. They came finally to monastery built on top of the hill, similar to the castle of the evil knight Kato from Mio, my Mio. They tried to enter the monastery to find the place to stay overnight, but it was unfortunately closed for a day. So the guys went to the local church to ask where to find a bed. Nobody could understand who they were and what they wanted, but somehow they managed to arrange three beds at some grandma’s flat.

Day 23. Orovski (Slovakia) – Donovaly. 50 km.

The day when guys thought they started to lose their minds. Cycling for dozens kilometers, they couldn’t quite understand what’s wrong with a water stream that went towards them. All their feelings were saying that they were going downhill – they could see it, and it was pretty easy to push pedals. It was very discomfortable to see the signs that their feelings’re wrong, so they made a small test. The guys put the bikes on the road allowing them to roll freely, and of course they found that the water stream was right – they simply got optical illusion. Finally they were riding constantly uphill for about 30 kilimeters.

The most unpleasant daily ride finished on the top of the hill in the city Donovaly. The cyclists stayed overnight at one of the men’s house after having half a kilo of Chili Con Carne for the dinner.

Day 24. Donovaly – Dregelypalank. 140 km.

The day started from riding 30 km towards city Zvolen. After a break the guys decided to keep riding until Budapest, the capital city of Hungary. They calculated the distance between Zvolen and Budapest would be around 100 km, so they started riding.

After passing Hungarian boarder and thinking they got only 20 km left, the cyclists suddenly saw a road sing “Budapest – 85 km”. So the guys went directly to the nearest pub (RK: Well, I would also need a couple of beer after such “mistake” )

Day 25. Dregelypalank – Budapest. 90 km.

It became clear last evening that guys messed up with mathematics and currency exchange, thinking for some reasons that Hungary is very cheap country. As result, they spent all their cash in the pub. They withdrew more cash in the nearest ATM machine and started the final ride towards Budapest.

Day 26. Budapest.

After sleeping really well, the guys went to explore the city. They had a walk over streets and bridges until they reached a castle on the top of the hill where they had photo session number 3882. They tasted Hungarian bread. Hungarian bread with hot sausages. Hungarian bread with jam. And Hungarian Whopper too.

That’s it for now. The ride goes further to the East from Budapest to Romania. The trip goes on!

All posts about the trip from Sweden to China by bicycle can be found here.

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