Translating Equal Earth into Arabic
Following up on my Japanese cartography post, here’s how an equal-area projection map launched an Arabic translation. You can download the original and translated posters on their website, equal-earth.com
How to add Arabic text on Adobe Illustrator (Creative Cloud)
First, you can’t just paste Arabic text into Illustrator like you do with most other scripts. Virtually every error that I’ve seen, from supermarkets to the Vatican, likely can be traced to this product. Watch closely:
Transliterating
A Natural Earth spreadsheet from the Equal Earth team was quite useful, and its errors can be detected by a careful reader. For example, someone had transliterated Sioux Falls as سايوكس فالز “Sa-ee-o-k-s Falz”), so I checked Wikipedia for سو فولز “Suu Folz”. Shout-out to Worcester (وستر) here, too.
In a number of cases, there was a Persian/Farsi or Urdu article on Wikipedia, but no Arabic one. These languages may use Arabic script, but they have additional letters which change the transliterations. Consider “Galapagos”:
- Arabic: غالاباغوس
- Persian: گالاپاگوس
- Urdu: گالاپاگوز
Where Arabic started with غـ, Persian and Urdu make use of گ (a softer ‘g’ visually similar to their ‘k’ كـ). They also have a پ for ‘p’. Persian and Urdu differ on representing the final s of Galapagos (Urdu’s ز being more of a z).
Completing the map
Over the past two years, as other translations have come in, we’ve had a few people volunteer to complete the translation, and I’ve mentioned the project to colleagues in the US and in Iraqi Kurdistan. Periodically, Tom Patterson (of Equal Earth) will Tweet out new and in-progress translations, and get some volunteers. In July he made a new call for volunteers:
One of the respondents, Ibrahim Mohammed from Egypt, was able to put in the work and complete the translation. His adoption of this translation project made a huge difference and the credit is first and foremost to him, followed by the persistence of Tom in finding and supporting volunteers, and me as sort of a footnote as I ended my work on this months ago.
Why does a new translation take so long to complete? I could only go a certain distance before needing a translator. After this point, we need an unpaid volunteer translator who is familiar with Illustrator, nerds out over map projections, and has time to adjust all of the labels. That turns out to be a big request. I think if Equal Earth can spread to more places, be more widely known, and have a translation fund, we could find more contributors for a very reasonable fee.
