Word

Kalima (Arabic for "word") is a project funded by the Abu Dhabi Authority for Culture and Heritage which aims to increase the number of books in translatation available to readers in the Arabic language. According to their website, that won't be hard; there's a real dearth of such works available at the moment. "If you are looking for the works of Freud or Chaucer for example, you will not find them in Arabic. ... Spain translates in one year the number of books that have been translated into Arabic in the past 1000 years."

I'm already a fan of the project just from having learned that one of the first six titles they've translated is Haruki Murakami's novel Kafka on the Shore. Arabic readers looking for something meatier can at last read Stephen Hawking's A Briefer History of Time--David E