>> So please welcome to the stage Rami Ismail!
From Vlambeer!
>> Hi.
My name is Rami Ismail.
As Andy just explained.
I'm a game developer, I'm also a creator of tools for independent developers, and beyond
that, I'm also a traveler.
I like travel, but I like travel mostly because it helps me figure out ways to help developers
around the world.
One of the things I'm really passionate about is that this medium of ours, this world of
ours, is connected in unbelievable ways, and that somebody that is in South Africa, Uruguay,
or China can make a game.
As long as you have a computer and basic internet access, you can make videogames.
I cherish that.
I think that is very, very important.
But here in the West there are some things that upset me.
And I want to talk about those things.
So this is step zero.
I want to show you something that annoys me.
But it's going to take some explanation.
To be exact, I have to teach you something new.
To be more precise, I'm going to have to teach you Arabic.
So...
Sit back.
[laughter] Let’s do this.
So step one...
This combination of letters means Alif Lam Mim.
They happen in the Quran.
They're actually some of the first characters in the Quran.
Nobody knows what they mean.
Nobody knows what they're supposed to mean, either.
They're used frequently in the Quran, but that's about all we know.
These are the glyphs again, but with the correct letter under the correct Arabic glyph.
So let's start with teaching you a letter.
This is the letter B, “ba”.
Second letter of the alphabet, just like in English, and pronounced like a shorter version
of the English letter B. “Ba.”
So that's B.
So, on this slide, I showed you A-L-M.
So what does this say in English letters?
B-A.
That's correct.
If you guessed A-B, you got the letters right, those are the letters A and B.
But the problem is that Arabic isn't read from left to right.
It's read from right to left.
So the correct response is B-A.
As you see, on the slides here, I've put B-A in Arabic from right to left, but I've put
the English from left to right.
That might be a little bit confusing, but that's the way it's going to be for this presentation,
because there's literally no other way of doing it.
[laughter]
So the answers we’ll see the opposite way of the Arabic.
So the other thing you need to know is that Arabic is a cursive script.
That means that our letters are connected.
There are some exceptions to that, which I'll mention later, and they're not really relevant,
but for now, let's agree that the top glyphs say B-A and the bottom ones say “Ba.”
Okay?
So, yeah?
Got that?
Okay, good.
Let's say this.
“Ba ba.”
>> [AUDIENCE:] “ABBA” [applause]
>> All right.
Ball.
Correct.
Notice that the aleph, the second letter, is not connected to the L. That’s one of
those exceptions I was talking about, but not really relevant again.
Let's try introducing a new letter.
This is the T. “tuh.”
Not that hard.
Let's try this English name.
Pat.
Yeah.
We don't really have a letter for P, so this is Pat, just as much as it is Bat.
Not all things translate across language barriers.
So let's try this.
All right?
Here's a hint.
Tab.
T-A-B.
Okay.
Another letter.
“Th.”
So it looks exactly like the previous one.
Just with an extra dot.
It's the fourth letter.
So what was this word?
Bat.
So what is this?
Bath.
Perfect.
New letter.
This is the N. It's “nun.”
It looks a lot like the B, but the dot is on the other side.
So for the B, it's underneath.
For the nun, it's overhead.
Let's try this.
“An.”
Everybody see an?
Yeah, A-N.
Let's try a really hard one.
Who said that?
Nathan?
Nathan is correct.
N-A-TH-A-N.
Did everybody get that?
[laughter] So we're going to start at the start.
It's a squiggly thing with the dot above.
That's an N, and the lineup is an A, and the third letter, the Th, right?
Not T, but Th, because it has three dots above.
Then we've got another A, then we have the squiggly thing with the dot above again, which
is an N. Okay?
Nathan.
Or Nah-than.
That was a rough one, I'll admit.
So let's introduce a rough character, just for fun.
This is the Waw.
The Waw actually doesn't have one correct pronunciation.
It has three correct pronunciations.
To make things easy.
It can be pronounced as a W, a U, and an O. So it's a pretty versatile character.
We like it a lot.
So let's try this.
Remember, dot below is a B. Dot above is an N. Bon.
Bob.
NATO.
N-A-T-O.
Perfect!
If you know chemistry, this one is easy.
What?
Somebody said butane?
Butane.
Perfect.
All right.
We're good?
Let's try this.
This is the Fa.
The letter F. It's a pretty simple letter.
It only has one pronunciation.
F. So what's this?
Fan.
Perfect.
Fauna.
F-O-N-A.
Try this one.
Photo!
Perfect.
You're getting there.
This is good.
This is exciting.
All right.
Let's try a new character again.
This is a Dal.
It's pronounced D. Okay?
So let's try this book.
“Dune!”
[laughter] Okay.
That was...
Okay.
I should have known that would have been an easy one.
So this is the Ra.
It's pronounced as the R. It looks very similar to the Dal, the previous letter, but you'll
note that the Dal was flat, and the Ra extends under the baseline.
So let's try this.
Door.
Okay?
Draft.
Draft, perfect.
D-R-A-F-T.
Okay?
Let's try this.
[laughter]
Dude-bro.
Perfect!
[laughter] [applause] Yes!
Okay!
Let's move on.
This is a new character.
This is the Mim.
Now, the Mim is kind of strange.
We saw it back at the start of the presentation, Aleph-Lem-Mim.
A-L-M, and this is the M. But there's something strange about this character that applies
to a lot of characters in Arabic.
Which is that it looks different depending on where in the word it is.
So all of these are the letter M. All the way on the left there, you've got the M, if
it's just separate.
Then you’ve got the M if it's at the start of a word.
The M if it's in the middle of the word, and the M if it's at the end of the word.
So some Arabic characters actually vary wildly in shape, depending on where they are in the
word.
For this character, it's not that bad, but you've still got to remember two separate
shapes.
Okay?
Now...
Let's try this one.
Madame.
No.
No...
Just because I put the M in the slide doesn't mean it's the first letter in the word.
Drama!
Perfect.
Slightly harder, that one.
Film.
F-L-M.
Remember, if it was an Aleph, if it was F-A-M, the second letter would actually not connect
to the third letter, because the Aleph cannot connect forward.
F-L-M.
Film.
Mom.
Correct.
Again...
Mim at the start, Mim at the end, but they look different.
Same letter.
Let's do a few more letters.
[laughter]
This is the qaf.
It's pronounced “kuh.”
This is the kaf.
It's also pronounced “kuh.”
I don't really know why we have both, but some Arabic accents use the qaf a lot, and
some don't.
Sometimes we have double letters.
I don't know.
Let's try this word, then.
Click.
Blank.
This is sort of cheating.
If you put the Lam and the Alif next to each other, they combine into a single character
called the Lam-Alif that's pronounced Luh.
I don't know.
I don't try to explain language.
Language is just the way it is.
I'm not going to try to figure that one out.
Okay, this one is the hardest one in the entire presentation.
Congrats.
This is the Ya.
It can be pronounced as Y, as I, or as A, and it has different shapes, depending on
where it is in the word.
It's great.
Let's try this European city.
Madrid.
Perfect!
M-A-D-R-A-D.
Madrid.
This one?
That's my name!
Rami!
That's me!
[laughter] Okay.
So this is the entire Arabic alphabet, and the green letters are the letters you've learned.
Not bad, right?
Didn't take too long.
We've been going at it for 12 minutes, and you know about half of the alphabet.
Well done.
Congrats.
Step two.
So even though I've taught you characters, you haven't read a single Arabic word.
They were all English words written in Arabic glyphs.
So in this part of the presentation, I'll give you an Arabic word and the English translation,
and your challenge is going to be to read the word to me.
So let's try that.
What is this word?
B’ab.
B’ab is door.
Let's try this.
Am’y.
Yeah, it means my mother.
Okay?
Now, in Arabic, we do this funny thing where, if you change possessions, basically the final
letter of a word changes.
So if you change the final letter here, you get a different word.
How would you pronounce this?
‘ummik.
Which is your mother.
Now try this one.
Sorry?
Yes.
Qalam.
In Egyptian...
I'm half Egyptian.
It would be Alum.
Because we don't like that first letter.
We don't like to have double K.
We drop it most of the time.
It would be Alum.
There's an enormous variety of dialects and accents in Arabic.
But okay.
How about this word?
B’it.
This word for house.
Okay.
Let's try this one, then.
Who said that?
What did you say?
Fnd’q.
Yes.
Fnd’q is correct.
Fnd’q is hotel.
Means hotel in Arabic.
It's a word you'll come across if you go to the Arabic world, probably.
So step three...
Let's see an image from a popular video game.
And I want you to tell me what it says in Arabic.
It's up there at the top.
What does the building say?
Let me take it out of the image because it's kind of unclear.
Yeah, let me connect the letters.
qdnf.
“qdnf” doesn't really mean anything.
They just put a piece of gibberish on a big set piece in a video game?
Is that really what happened?
Let me try putting the letters...
Pulling the letters apart for you.
QDNF.
Anybody see the problem here?
Can you read that for me?
$100 million is reportedly the budget for this video game.
$100 million.
And they could not spare...
What?
The $100 it would have taken to pick somebody random from the street to check if the big
fucking sign on their hotel was right?
[laughter] [applause] $100 million?
This is a game in which a giant part of the budget went into making sure that you can
shoot my people in hyperrealistic fashion, and that they fall over nice and that the
explosions look nice.
QDNF!
[laughter] $100 million, and they didn't even check.
It took me, what?
30 minutes?
30 minutes to make you figure out why this was wrong.
This isn't just a translation error.
This is a gross disrespect towards an entire culture.
Towards an entire people that speaks a language.
$100 million and nobody spent a dollar on making sure QDNF wasn't on the building.
This game isn't a lone example.
Pretty much every large video game nowadays gets it wrong.
Watched the previews at E3, one of the largest trade shows in the games industry, wrong every
single time I saw Arabic.
Either the words were from left to right, the characters were from left to right or
the words just didn't actually mean anything.
Sometimes they wanted to write “Children’s Toy Factory” and they write “Children
Factory.”
[laughter] This can happen!
This is 2015, that can happen.
They get the cursive script wrong, the voice acting wrong, the wrong language.
They don't actually speak Arabic in all parts of the Middle East.
Some places they actually don't.
So many...
So many things get this wrong.
And it's actually not just video games.
Part of the problem -- that's not Arabic either.
Not even close to Arabic.
In fact, it's so widespread that a friend of mine has a blog, nopenotarabic.tumblr.com,
where he lists these.
And the problem is...
A, people are lazy.
They don’t check.
They don't care.
They don't care about people that aren’t here, people in the Arabic world.
The other part is computers are really bad at Arabic.
In fact, that's probably not the fault of the person who made this.
That's the fault of Unicode, of the way text is implemented.
In fact, when I started to load this presentation, I had to do something that probably nobody
ever has to do when they start a presentation, which is to make sure that the Arabic is correct.
When I copy/paste between Word and PowerPoint, you know what happens?
The Arabic breaks.
Every single connection between every letter breaks.
It doesn't happen always, so I have to do a nice little fun little checkup.
When copy-pasting, did I actually copy-paste text, or is it just gibberish now?
This is a thing that’s very easy to solve.
Not talking about something that would require billions and billions.
I'm talking about something that would just require you to send an email to somebody who
speaks Arabic.
Just five minutes of your time, for a culture you don't understand, and a culture that at
this point, the only way we're interacting with them is letting them know...
Hey, we don't even take you serious enough to write the word “hotel” on your buildings.
Fuck that.
[laughter] [applause] Thank you!
[applause]