Background:
The Arabic language was the language of medicine for many centuries. Today, only a handful of institutions teach medicine in Arabic, including all public universities in Syria. While the Arabic medical literature is poor, and latest evidence is only available in English, most doctors studying in these institutions are not proficient in English. Their situation is exacerbated by the current conflict, and they are, to a large extent, unable to use best evidence in the care of their patients.

Objectives: We describe an initiative to translate Cochrane Blogshots into Arabic, and explore the barriers facing this translation. In addition, we report on the perceived benefits of a sample of the target audience from this initiative.

Methods: Twenty-seven volunteers from Syria worked on co-ordinating this effort. A convenience sample of 155 Facebook page users targeted by the initiative, were surveyed for their perception with an eight-question online questionnaire.

Results: We produced 38 Blogshot translations from June to November 2017. Translations were shared to the initiative Facebook page. Despite 'below average' interaction with the posts, 88 participants stated that there was a need for this initiative in their community. Slightly less than two-thirds stated that the biggest barrier was that further information, required to fully understand the Blogshot, was not available in Arabic.
Linguistic challenges in translation included the slow introduction of new terms, use of loan rather than unified terms, and confusion between higher and lower registers. Volunteers were examined for proficiency in both languages and were recruited with difficulty, their subsequent participation in the project was hindered by a range of difficulties from siege, to purposeful cutting of water and electricity, total lack of funding and the dangers of life in Syria; in December one of our most hard-working volunteers was shot in a Damascus suburb and died.

Conclusions:
Challenges were human and financial resources, linguistic, and the circumstances of war. The targeted audience seemed to perceive benefit from the translations, though qualitative studies into benefit and perception are essential. In the future, real knowledge benefits need a wider translation of Cochrane content into Arabic.