The Current State and Challenges faced by Arabic Digital Content

The issue of Arabic digital content is of paramount importance at various levels, for it undoubtedly represents a true reflection of the productivity level in various areas of knowledge, including scientific and cultural. This paper discusses Arabic digital content, its current realities and the most important challenges in relation to the world’s digital content.

This paper investigates the lack of Arabic digital content on the Internet and reveals the large gap between contributions from users of Arabic and users of other world languages. The paper reveals that the bulk of Arabic content are primarily translations and reproductions of the content provided by other language users, often with errors in both processes.



The content on the Internet in Arabic represents all the information available in digital form in various fields of knowledge. Content in all languages are increasing exponentially every year. The importance of content in a particular language benefits its speakers. There are administrative and service benefits of e-government content, economic benefits from e-commerce content, especially on both internal and external trade amongst Arabs, taking the case of Arabic digital content. There are scientific and technological benefits arising from scientific and technological content often delivered via e-learning, and cultural benefits from digital cultural content and heritage and so on. Content and its benefits are becoming increasingly important as users of the Internet and computers are growing, measured by the number of users who speak the language of the content (Wolff, 2003).