Published: 16 May 2023
Last updated: 9 May 2025
Noy Mordekovitch had spent hours trying to persuade an Arab man from East Jerusalem to apply for his entitlements on the Jerusalem municipality website.
Like many Arab citizens of Israel, the man was suspicious of the municipality and daunted by the forms, which are often only in Hebrew. But this form was in Arabic, so he agreed to try. He returned to Mordekovitch discouraged.
“I couldn’t find the right place to fill in the form,” he reported. “Just a recipe.”
Arabic has two words for “filling”: one used for filling in a form, the other for stuffing vegetables.
The amateur translation used the wrong word in the link to the form, building another barrier for a resident trying to exercise his rights.
Mordekovitch has a stock of such stories. He is Executive Director of 0202 Updates, a not-for-profit civil society organisation dedicated to providing information in Arabic to support the city’s 360,000 Arab residents. (The name comes from the landline code for Jerusalem.)
A sign meant to read ‘Beware of the danger from digging’ was translated to read ‘Beware of ignorance’.
Research 18 months ago found only 10% of government information is translated into Arabic and it is often not the 10% that the Arabic-speaking population needs. For example, the Ministry of Security translates its announcements, but many of the civil services don’t.
