{"id":4286,"date":"2016-07-24T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2016-07-24T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.globalizationpartners.com\/2016\/07\/24\/the-growing-arabic-speaking-marketplace\/"},"modified":"2021-01-04T18:41:19","modified_gmt":"2021-01-04T18:41:19","slug":"the-growing-arabic-speaking-marketplace","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.globalizationpartners.com\/2016\/07\/24\/the-growing-arabic-speaking-marketplace\/","title":{"rendered":"The Growing Arabic Speaking Marketplace"},"content":{"rendered":"

Global marketers planning to target the Middle East are missing a huge opportunity if they don’t translate their digital content into Arabic.<\/p>\n

Below is a look at the size of the Arabic-speaking market.<\/p>\n

Market research company Common Sense Advisory\u00a0 states<\/a> in order to reach 90% of the online community, you need to translate your content into 14 languages. Arabic\u00a0is the seventh most important language<\/a> online.<\/p>\n

See The Top Ten Language Pairs<\/a> for other leading languages.<\/p>\n

Arabic is spoken in 27 countries, from Mauritania in northwest Africa to Oman on the Arabian Peninsula, and the number of Arabic-speaking Internet users has more than doubled since 2010;\u00a0a much higher growth rate compared to other languages. (Source:\u00a0Mideastmedia.org<\/a>)<\/p>\n

A study by\u00a0Northwestern University in Qatar and Doha Film Institute<\/a> surveyed 6,058 respondents across Egypt, Lebanon, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia and the United Arab Emirates. They found that despite a rapid increase in the number of Arabic-speaking Internet users, Arabic content remains one of the most under-represented languages online in terms of its share of the world’s websites.<\/p>\n

Even in predominantly Arabic-speaking countries like Egypt, a third of the top 50 visited websites are either not available in Arabic or do not include Arabic as the “default” or primary language.<\/p>\n

\"gpi-arabic<\/p>\n

A May 2016 Gulfbusiness.com\u00a0 report<\/a> quoted\u00a0CEO of the Doha Film Institute Fatma Al Remaihi as saying, “The Pan-Arab media industry is growing faster than the economy, at about 19 percent per year with both online and offline channels experiencing rapid expansion.”<\/p>\n

Additionally,\u00a0globalarabnetwork.com<\/a> reported that\u00a0ecommerce is growing 45% annually in Arab countries, compared to 20% in Europe and 35% in Asia (2015).<\/p>\n

This highlights the tremendous opportunity for marketers to reach the Arabic-speaking population, in their own language. It is also paramount that, along with translating and localizing a business website into Arabic, marketers consider the growing social media landscape in the region. Marketing company Extradigital\u00a0 reports<\/a> that Facebook and WhatsApp are the most popular social media channels while LinkedIn and Twitter also show substantial numbers of users.<\/p>\n

However, as a recent survey by Common Sense Advisory\u00a0 points out<\/a>, marketers need to consider the many regional variants of Arabic. While Egyptian Arabic has\u00a089 million native speakers out of a total of 166 million, marketers need to thoroughly research the dialect spoken in their target country to ensure they reap the benefits of appropriate localization.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Global marketers planning to target the Middle East are missing a huge opportunity if they don’t translate their digital content into Arabic. Below is a look at the size of the Arabic-speaking market. Market research company Common Sense Advisory\u00a0 states in order to reach 90% of the online community, you need to translate your content […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":4287,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[96,648,351,126],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.globalizationpartners.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4286"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.globalizationpartners.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.globalizationpartners.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.globalizationpartners.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.globalizationpartners.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4286"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.globalizationpartners.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4286\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29434,"href":"https:\/\/www.globalizationpartners.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4286\/revisions\/29434"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.globalizationpartners.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4287"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.globalizationpartners.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4286"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.globalizationpartners.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4286"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.globalizationpartners.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4286"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}