Facebook available in Arabic and Hebrew

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Facebook has announced that it will be making the site available in Arabic and Hebrew.

It is already available in 40 languages and development is underway for a further 60.

Ghassan Haddad, leader on the translation process for the site, said on the official Facebook blog: "Supporting different languages on the web always entails many technical, cultural and linguistic issues, but right-to-left languages present extra challenges."

Facebook, which has an estimated 175 million users, has said its "work isn't done yet".

Haddad said: "Our goal is to make Facebook available in every language across the world."

The announcement that could secure Facebook's further domination in this market comes in a week that social networking sites were branded as more popular than email by a report from Nielsen Online. The report also stated that social networking sites were now visited by over two-thirds of the global online population.

Jennifer Scott

Jennifer Scott is a former freelance journalist and currently political reporter for Sky News. She has a varied writing history, having started her career at Dennis Publishing, working in various roles across its business technology titles, including ITPro. Jennifer has specialised in a number of areas over the years and has produced a wealth of content for ITPro, focusing largely on data storage, networking, cloud computing, and telecommunications.

Most recently Jennifer has turned her skills to the political sphere and broadcast journalism, where she has worked for the BBC as a political reporter, before moving to Sky News.