ذرب

Tharb brings Arabic eloquence back into everyday writing.

Arab tribes once celebrated three things: the birth of a boy, a mare foaling, and a poet rising among them (Ibn Rashiq, al-ʿUmda). A single verse could raise a tribe or bring it low.

That eloquence survives, but it is scarce and buried in books. Much of what people read every day is translated or rushed. Now machines write a growing share of what is published. They learn from that text, write in its image, and their output returns to the web to teach the machines that follow.

At Tharb Research we built an index that detects the fingerprints of machine writing in Arabic text, and ran it over thousands of Arabic publications since 2011. The fingerprint stayed rare for more than a decade, then jumped after ChatGPT: its growth index rose from 100 in the early 2010s to nearly 1,700 in 2025. The danger is closer than it looks.

If the Arabic people read every day becomes machine Arabic, and that Arabic is poor, we will grow used to the poverty and mistake it for the language.

So we are building Tharb, a writing and editing assistant that keeps the facts, the meaning and the writer’s voice, and produces prose that is Arabic in structure and spirit. The examples above show the habits we want to fix: filler that buries the one useful fact, phrasing carried over from English, and small grammar slips that quietly change the meaning.

The name comes from the Arabic for a fluent, eloquent tongue.