Great idea... another "regional" portal for Maemo Community after MaemoFr.org and MaemoIT.org...
Off the top of my head, I saw the thread title and thought "Damned good idea". My experience of traveling in a few Arabic speaking countries leads me to conclude that whatever the US newscasters say, nokia is one of the most popular brands in places like Egypt, and there are just as many techies there as anywhere else. I speak no arabic, so can't help much. But you have my support. (Recalls a long techie chat with a shopkeeper in Tunisia comparing mobile phones... the one man there who never tried to sell me anything!) Off topic, we have athread running about putting a Bible onto an n900. It's would be waaay cool if a translation of the Koran would run on the same software.
This sounds like an unbelievable amount of work, congrats for your ambition.
Definitely maemo.org needs to think how to address local communities in languages other than English. I just got an email from a similar promoter interested in maemo.org in Russian. We can only expect more cases to come. So while we help abu9al7 with the Arabic version we should basically help anybody with a same goal in another language. Should we start a maemo.org internationalization thread?
Amazing idea. I wish you all the luck. I guess that nokia will translate maemo 5 to Arabic. If they plan to make N900 its high end phone they need to create much more content in every language.
The Maemo logo in Arabic looks really nice. I wish best of luck and success for http://www.ArMaemo.org.
Looks very ineresting indeed, especially since this has the potential to atract developers for apps. etc. from all parts of the world. I could be interested in doing something similar with Chinese although I would need some help since I'm not a native speaker myself. abu9al7, it would be very useful to me if you could keep me/us posted on your progress. I think I could learn much from your experience if I decide to go through with the Chinese version. One thing that I'm wondering about though is how to deal with the possibility of having two threads in different languages discussing the same thing. While it may in fact be positive in some ways it does limit the exchange of ideas somewhat.
I think we should certainly give support to localisation, the only problem is then de-centralisation of things like HowTos, forums, etc. Not sure how that could/would be handled.