Oman Telecommunications Company "Oman Mobile" www.omanmobile.om, Oman’s leading mobile telecommunications service provider, will launch next Saturday a new instant translation service for SMS messages for Oman mobile users which is based on Sakhr’s online translation technology.
The launch of this instant translation service, offering Arabic-English translation and vice versa, comes as a result of the agreement signed on Sunday, 11.09.2005, between Sakhr Software Co. and Oman Mobile, by which Sakhr is to provide its SMS translation service, integrating this service with others offered by Oman Mobile to its clients and subscribers in OMAN.
Oman Mobile has designated the number (90110) to which users can send an SMS text, in either Arabic or English, and within seconds they can expect to receive the message translated into the other language, at the cost of 40 baiza per SMS. However, the agreement signed by the two companies will be offering this service at a promotional rate of 10 baiza only per SMS for a period of two months, with the aim of ensuring that a larger segment of users may benefit from this subscription-free service. The translation is achieved by passing the message through Sakhr’s servers which include the online machine translation available at www.ajeeb.com.
“We are very pleased to join forces with Sakhr, the Arab software giant, so that we may benefit from its advanced technologies,” commented Dr. Amer Awadh Al-Rawas, Managing Director - Oman Mobile. He added, “Because our company continually endeavor to offer the best service to as large as segment as possible of our clientele, we believe that this translation service will be quite popular with our mobile users as it will bridge the language barrier they may face in their daily life, taking into consideration the rich cultural and linguistic diversity of society in OMAN.”
“This is the first step on the path of joint collaborative efforts between Sakhr and Oman Mobile. We are certain of the success of this venture in OMAN due to the excellent reputation enjoyed by Oman Mobile, and the unprecedented & exceptional success this service has met in other Arab countries,” commented Moatasem Mohaisen, Regional Director, Sakhr Software Co., expressing his delight at this collaboration between Sakhr and Oman Mobile – highly regarded as a pioneering telecommunications company throughout the Arab world and the Middle East. He added, “We at Sakhr have translation and speech solutions and technologies which will open new horizons to future cooperation with Oman Mobile.”
The new service means that users will be able to obtain instant translation for all their SMS messages, both to and from Arabic and English, and this even includes expressions, phrases and abbreviations frequently used by “chat” and SMS connoisseurs. According to preliminary studies carried out by each of Sakhr and Oman Mobile, this service is expected to gain widespread popularity amongst mobile users who would like to translate text in the same way as using a bilingual dictionary, or those who wish to send SMS messages to their friends in another language. It is also anticipated that students and the youth of OMAN will form the largest user segment for this instant translation service, followed by businessmen and tourists.
The quality of the translation provided by this service is the same as the exceptionally high quality translation available at Ajeeb.com for the translation of texts and websites. It is notable that the more Sakhr’s translation technology is actually utilized, the more the quality of its output is enhanced and improved.
