This follows the country receiving approval from the international body responsible for managing and assigning names for the Internet addresses to have its Internet domains written in Arabic.
Arabic speaking users will be able to browse Internet using their native language by typing directly into their web browsers without the need to use the Latin characters (the 26 letters "a-z", numbers 0 to 9, and hyphens).
"The TRA is at the middle stages of the process to launch the Arabic internationalised top-level domain (IDN), the next stage of this process is called String Delegation, which will result in a full launch of the Arabic IDNs. Currently, the TRA is working on the completion of this project and we are expecting the launching of this by mid 2011 due to string delegation process time requirement," said Eng. Mohammed bin Hamud Al Kindy, senior manager of Technical Affairs Unit at the TRA. "TRA is also looking for accreditation of registrars that the registration of such domain names will be through them," he added.
The TRA official said, "this move will also allow the government institutions that provide e-government services, and companies wishing to provide e-commerce services and other services provided through the Internet, to communicate in Arabic language and make their websites accessible to everyone".
TRA said the Sultanate has passed the string evaluation process of Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which is required to launch the IDN in Arabic language. The evaluation process includes several steps such as verification that the selected language is considered official in the country of the request and that the string requested is a meaningful representation of the corresponding country name.
ICANN also requests for a documentation of community support for the string and assess whether the string requested raise any significant security and stability issues in the domain name system or raise any confusion issues with any existing top level domain names or other requested top level domain names.
Essential step
The IDNs are domain names that include characters other than the currently available set of the Latin characters. Under ICANN's IDN process, new Internet extensions that represent country names can be requested in Chinese, Russian, Arabic and several other languages. Commenting on the achievement Al Kindy said, "the use of the Arabic language in the Web addresses would increase the number of users and service access for new segments of society".
"Although Arabising the content is an essential step, to get full benefit, it is necessary to enable the user to access the Arabic content through Arabic addresses and domain names, without any language barrier starting from opening the PC to access any information on the Internet."
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Quelle/Source: Zawya, 21.10.2010
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