Abstract—Many pilgrims (Hajjs) to Mecca in Saudi Arabia lack the basic knowledge of pilgrimage rituals and practices even though millions of ritual booklets are printed in different languages and distributed among pilgrims before they depart their countries. This paper presents a mobile translation application for Hajjs with different languages to assist pilgrims in performing their Hajj correctly. The system will help pilgrims communicate easily with other pilgrims with different languages. Short message service will be used as a method of communication with the server to facilitate machine translation on mobile phone which is easier, faster, reliable and available in all network scans. The paper will present issues encountered during the development of the application and also reports some results on the “Translation Service” which translates Arabic sentences into other languages on mobile phones using short messaging service on Binary Runtime Environment for Wireless (BREW) emulator.

Index Terms—translation service, pilgrimage rituals, Hajj, mobile phone application, BREW

Cite: Malak A. Abdelazeez and Adnan Shaout, "Pilgrim Communication Using Mobile Phones," Journal of Image and Graphics, Vol. 4, No. 1, pp. 59-62, June 2016. doi: 10.18178/joig.4.1.59-62