14 DAY TRIAL // Yahoo Mail is now available in Arabic. Users can now sign up and use the popular webmail client entirely in Arabic, something they haven't been able to do so far.
Apart from the Arabic translation, Yahoo is also debuting an interesting option for the new Yahoo Mail, the entire interface can be mirrored if you're using the Arabic language version.
Arabic being a language written and read from right to left, as opposed to the more common left to right of European and Asian languages, therefore users are more used to having elements flowing from right to left.
Yahoo! has a large and growing audience with millions of users from this vast region visiting Yahoo! Mail daily. Now, we’re excited to announce that users can register for a new Yahoo! Mail account in Arabic," Vivek Rao, Product Manager at Yahoo Mail, wrote.
"In addition to an Arabic language user interface, we also mirrored Yahoo! Mail (Arabic is read and written from right to left) and included an updated rich text editor so users can write and respond to emails and instant messages in Arabic," he explained.
"Users will also benefit from engaging local news content, courtesy of our friends at Yahoo! Maktoob," he added.
Considering the size of the Arabic-speaking audience, it's a surprise that it took Yahoo this long to launch a localized version of its very popular Yahoo Mail. This especially after Yahoo bought the Arabic portal Maktoob, more than two years ago.
Yahoo alone says that there are 70 million people in the Middle East and North Africa, the places where Arabic is spoken predominantly, and 50 million more are expected to go online in the next three years.
This makes it very important that they can sign up for a Yahoo account and a Yahoo email entirely in Arabic, simplifying the process for new users.