Foreign Names in Arabic

Processing non-Arab names in Arabic script presents significant linguistic challenges, both in transcribing from Latin to Arabic (Arabization), such as Abramovitz to أبراموفيتز, as well as romanizing Arabic to Latin scripts, such as أبراموفيتز or ابراموفيتز and others to Abramovitz.

Through an international collaboration effort including Arabic name specialists, CJKI has developed new techniques for the collection, validation and attestation of non-Arab names written in Arabic, and has compiled a Database of Foreign Names in Arabic, referred to as DAFNA. The database currently covers over 240,000 such names and their variants. The final database will intentionally include linguistically invalid entries and spelling mistakes to ensure that using the database will result in high recall when doing matching.