My engagement with Arabic and the Middle East hasn’t been updated for 10 years, though things filter into my streams occasionally on Twitter and YouTube.
I started seeing this a year ago, people would use “content” to refer to media they create, much like we do in English. It’s a direct translation. But it sounds a lot like “content” as in, the contents of a container. Like the “contents” of a jar of pickles is pickles.
I know you get used to it and adopt it through exposure and it becomes natural over time, but hearing it in another language makes you really think about how utterly bizarre that choice of word is.
How weird is “content creator” as a phrase, anyway? At least in English, there’s a tech history of compound terms like “user-generated content” that were more explicit and bridged us over to the abbreviated “content”, but Arabic seems to have skipped that transitory phase.
Majd Taby 