From Twitter’s failure to Arabic film, users were busy this week
It was a lighter week on Twitter despite major events in the Arab world. The popular social media platform went offline globally for a couple of hours, leaving many users without the ability to share their thoughts. Once things got back to normal, regional users welcomed a plan to support Arabic cinema and discussed how to translate popular Arabic sentences into English.
Twitter down
What is the role that Twitter plays in your daily online routine? What happens when Twitter is offline? For many, Twitter is a critical part of their day online and this was particularly felt during this week’s global Twitter outage. @Iamdaaniyal wondered why the outage was trending. “But they are trending worldwide. Twitter is actually kidding with us.”
@ Burnt_ Out_ Darth, calling himself Darth Vader, claimed that he knew the reason behind the outage: “The Empire has identified Obi Wan Kenobi as be- ing responsible for the outage.”
@ davidjpfeiffer shared his thoughts on what was the worst part about the outage, stating that “there was no way to tweet about it”.
@ShujaRabbani wrote: “Twitter is still not working properly. Not loading tweets. It’s a bad day to tweet.”
@blufromonline joked about socialising with other people in the real world: “#Twitterdown was scary. When it went down for 10 minutes, I almost had to socialise with people in real life.”
@ObeyNova_ compared this to when Google went down: “Not being able to tweet about #Twitterdown was almost as bad as the day that Google broke and no one could Google what happened to Google.” @ emilysalmon45 explained her reaction to the outage: “Me during # twitterdown 2016: Logged into Facebook, remembered why I stopped using Facebook, logged out of Facebook.”
Alex @ AlexRogaski plotted his future: “During # twitterdown I managed to finish my homework, do my laundry, complete my education, score a job, get married, and have kids I resent.”
Support Arabic Cinema
Image Nation Abu Dhabi and the Dubai International Film Festival launched an initiative to encourage supporters to attend screenings of Arab films and share their experience using the hashtag #SupportArabCinema. Emirati Cinema @ECinemaC asked for support: “Suggest three Arab films that must be watched.” Image Nation @ ImageNationAD shared a link directing people on how to get involved in supporting the initiative with the tweet: “Have you got involved with the #SupportArabCinema campaign?”
@ sollyten gave a suggestion for a must- watch Arabic movie: “I highly recommend you watch Winter of Discontent starring Amr Waked.”
Samya @ sayish thought Jordan has potential for international film success, albeit stopping short of explaining why that might be the case: “100% believe in that #Jordan has all the features of success in cinema production!” Mohammed @ albaityM tweeted: “I love Arab Cinema! My favourite Arab film is Ajami.”
Arabic translations
A popular topic of conversation among users this week involved finding literal English translations for popular Arabic sentences and phrases. Users shared their funny and odd translations. Sometimes they revealed useful new terms while others were nonsensical in English.
@FaiDotAm pointed out that when people share silly suggestions, one Arabic phrase is “don’t put philosophy on my head”. Another philosophy term was shared by hamad @TrollEmarati: “Don’t pretend to be a philosopher on my brain”.
@IImiraII shared the term “let’s change the weather” to describe when someone is bored. Mariam @marxam said that if you want someone to get lost, you can say “flip your face”. @6Abdulrahman9, argued that when someone crosses a line, you can say “because I gave you a face”.
@ kyomou_ then wrote that when someone does something negative – something you didn’t expect them to do — the best thing to say is: “You fell from my eye.”