Playroom now supports UTF-8. If this is sufficient, technically we can go ahead. Arabic people have to confirm this. I don't know at all how right-to-left written languages are handled and whether UTF-8 is sufficient to support them or not.
However, the biggest problem is that we would need someone who can speak french, enough to have a skype conversation. That person will then become responsible for arabic translation, will be able to recruit other translaters who don't need to speak french, check that the team is doing well, and tell us about tem changes so that we can update access rights accordingly.
I'm not sure enough to make this fully in english. Other admins aren't at good at English than me and that's the main reason why we do this in that way. We do this because we don't want anymore translations that are quickly outdated, stay incomplete for a long time because they are no longer regularely followed, or become totally abandonned like turkish, albanian, or like portuguese or german in the past.
Beside the technical question of right-to-left written languages that is really special, the requirements are the same for any other translation, including those that have been already requested several times: serbian, polish, turkish and slovak among others, if I remember correctly.
Specificly for arabic, I have other questions and reflections.
IN the french playroom, there are quite a lot of people coming from North Africa. Many of them speak both french and arabic, and write arabic using latin letters. I may be wrong, but an arabic translation can probably only be interesting if it's the true arabic language, and not something like phonetically written arabic using latin letters, what looks to me like a kind of SMS language that would be unappropriate and perhaps even a kind of insult against the people who really speak and write arabic. Bonus question: only blind people do something like this ?
A question of curiosity now, is there dialects in arabic language ? CAn arabs from different countries understand eachother comfortably most of the time and that's just a question of minor accents and ideomatic expressions, or is it a real pain ?