When will Second Life include Arabic text?

A few months back we blogged about a petition to incorporate Arabic fonts and scripts into Second Life. It seems that Arabic is one of the few remaining languages of the major language groups left out of the game in Second Life. It turns out there's another petition people should be signing and voting on to get action.

IBM's Rob Smart (SL Yossarian Seattle) who has been working on solving multiple language issues in Second Life and the Arabic-English social networking tool Meedan commented at the time that the issue was well over a year old. Says Rob:

I raised the bug report for this way back in February last year some time http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-112

And also had a telephone conversation with Cory Ondrejka [ed: who was at the time CTO of Linden Lab] at the time with a request to fix it. Obviously it didn't get done. I suggest that you focus the petition on getting people to vote on that bug entry to get it high up in the Jira bug rankings so it gets assigned to a Linden developer.

Hamlet also gave a shout-out to this issue back in July on New World Notes, citing Second Life's own mission statement “To connect everyone to an online world that improves the human condition” as incentive enough to include it.

In addition, Second Life's leadership has been quoted at numerous speaking engagements noting that one of the benefits of Second Life is that it is a useful device for public diplomacy. Philip Rosedale mentioned it in his April 2008 testimony to the House Subcommittee Telecommunications and the Internet. Ondrejka reflected on it as well in a blogpost in April. I personally heard Robin Harper, Linden Lab's VP for Marketing and Community Development, mention it at a panel at the Virtual Worlds Conference in San Jose last year. More recently, Second Life had a special event about public diplomacy efforts in Second Life at Second Life's Fifth Birthday party.

Public diplomacy can't work if we're only speaking in only one language to an audience. Part of the success of public diplomacy is in letting your audience know that you are willing to listen. Part of listening is listening to people in their language. Public diplomacy at its worst is a monologue in one language -- at its best it is a dialogue, a conversation, collaboration. The beauty of virtual worlds is that they have the potential to facilitate all of this. But they can't do it if they prevent people from communicating in their own language.

As part of our Understanding Islam through Virtual Worlds quest, DIP has visited over dozen Mosques in Second Life in the past year.

In addition, Dancing Ink Productions is about to start a new virtual worlds project that requires the ability to use Arabic text in a virtual world. We're hoping to conduct the project in Second Life. But we may have to reconsider our plans if Linden Lab doesn't make this change in time.

We've interviewed hundreds of people from the Middle East and Muslim world who have demonstrated vibrant expressions of their culture and lives in virtual worlds, especially Second Life. We've spoken to them in French, Spanish, Portuguese. We've also witnessed Arabic speakers using what looked like l33t sp33k but was a workaround pidgeon Arabic in which they take English language fonts and assemble into Arabic-ish semblance. Muslima Questi, who built the Ummah of Noor Mosque in Second Life and who lives in the United Arab Emirates in the physical world, expressed her frustration like this:

I am fed up of constantly writing Arabic in english letters and using all the numbers to represent letters not found in the english language.. cant wait till we have a proper arabic platform in sl!

If this is, as Rob Smart says, just a bug. Please take a minute to vote in the bug forum, as Rob suggests and get this issue raised to a higher priority. Remember, the earlier petition is nice, but the one that is most likely to get a response from the Second Life developers (the people who will make the fix) is the post in the bug forum.

Until then, Second Life, the world is waiting ...