Prominent online service provider Yahoo! has announced that its home page, search engine and e-mail services would be available in the Arabic language as of the beginning of next year, allowing it to cater to some 22 million Arabic-speaking users.
Yahoo! co-founder and former CEO Jerry Yang recently told the American Chamber of Commerce in Egypt that the process of "Arabization" had begun two months ago, adding that Yahoo! already boasted a total of 6 million users in Egypt.
At an international conference devoted to e-government held in Sharm el-Sheikh on Monday, Egyptian Telecommunications Minister Tareq Kamel announced that all government websites were to be presented in the Arabic language.
At the event, Rod Beckstrom, director of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), said that roughly half of the world’s population would be able to surf the net in their native language — with Internet users reaching a total of 5 billion — in only a few years.
Translated from the Arabic Edition.
