المؤسسة المعجمية للغات الشرقية
株式会社日中韓辭典研究所
©2007-2008 The CJK Dictionary Institute, Inc.
NANA, which stands for Non-Arabic Name Arabizer (نعنع 'mint' in Arabic), is a system that arabizes, with a high degree of accuracy, non-Arabic names. This is not limited to Latin names, such as Jack Halpern to جـاك هلبرن , but also includes a truly unique technology: the direct arabization of CJK names. This means that the arabization rules and algorithms are specifically adjusted to names written in their original scripts -- romanized readings (shown in parentheses below) are unnecessary. For example, the Japanese place name 埼玉 is arabized as سايتاما (Saitama), the Chinese name 杨海洋 as يانغ هاييانغ (Yang Haiyang), and the Korean city of 부산 as بوسان (Busan).
On July 22, 2007 Jack Halpern presented an academic paper on ARAN/NANA at The Second Workshop on Computational Approaches to Arabic Script-based Languages (CAASL2) conference held at Stanford University. Go here for the full paper:
The Challenges and Pitfalls of Arabic Romanization and Arabization (.pdf file, 293K)
Developed by a team of experts on Arabic orthography and phonology at The CJK Dictionary Institute, NANA is a versatile, expandable system that represents the best of arabization technology today. See also the PowerPoint slide show presentation (240K) given at CAASL2.
See also our Automatic Romanizer of Arabic Names (ARAN)