I know this has been mentioned before in a discussion in 2009 but since the issue has not been resolved, I thought I would mention it again: Google translate does not provide a 'vocalized' translation when it translates English into Arabic. This makes the program effectively useless, as the only people who would be able to read unvocalized text are, indeed, Arabic speakers who probably do not need to translate anything. Since Google seems to be the only effective free Arabic translation software online, this is a big problem for someone trying to teach themselves. Just to specify, unvocalized text means that the words are written without vowels (though the long vowels, which do not exist in English, are written). To try to give an analogy of why this is a problem, imagine if an English dictionary were written unvocalized: if you searched for the word 'hat' you would only be given the letters 'ht'. That could mean 'hit' or 'hot' or 'hut', as well as 'hat'. Essentially, you would have to guess which vowel goes in between the consonants or whether there was any vowel there at all. Now imagine a word with multiple vowels and you can start to see how you might pronounce the word entirely incorrectly. While I understand that Arabic is commonly written unvocalized, that does not mean that a translation program should be. For some reason, even the 'read phonetically' option excludes vowels, meaning that you are not reading the word phonetically at all. The sad thing about this is that, judging from the words I already know, the program is incredibly good at translating. The words are just indecipherable unless you already know them.
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