An automatic English-Arabic HTML page translation system

The Internet and the World Wide Web have become an integral part of everyday life, an important source of information and a communication medium. One of the main problems confronting non-English speakers in using the Internet is that it is heavily dominated by the English language. Knowledge of English is a prerequisite for using the Web efficiently and benefiting from the multitude of services it offers. This paper introduces the approach underlying a prototype system that translates Web pages from English to Arabic automatically. The system uses a commercial machine translation system to translate the textual part of a Web page. It then displays a Web page containing the Arabic translation with all tags inserted in the right places so that the layout and content of the original (English) page are preserved.