Methods for porting NL-based restricted e-commerce systems into other languages

Multilingualizing systems handling content is an important but difficult problem. As a manifestation of this difficulty, very few multilingual services are available today. The process of multilingualization depends on the translational situation: types and level of possible accesses, available resources, and linguistic competences of participants involved in the multilingualization of an application. Several strategies of multilingualization are then possible (by translation, by internal or external localization etc.). We present a real case of linguistic porting (from Arabic to French) of an e-commerce application deployed in Jordan, using spontaneous SMS in Arabic for buying and selling second-hand cars. Despite the distance between Arabic and French, the localization methods used give good results because of the proximity of the two sublanguages of Arabic and French in this restricted domain.