Arabic Translation

Arabic is one of the six official languages of the United Nations. There are 200 million native Arabic speakers with as many as 200 million additional speakers. A total of 22 countries in North Africa and the Middle East have Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) as their official languages.

Varieties of Arabic

MSA is the language taught in schools and used in formal business communication and the media. There are countless varieties – or dialects – of Arabic, however. Tailoring the variety of Arabic to your specific target audience(s) will make readers feel most at home and demonstrate that inclusion is an important part of your ethos.

When starting an Arabic translation project, be sure to specify the regions you wish to target so your translation project manager can assign the best localisation teams. Skipping this step runs the risk of isolating specific audiences, with the translated message losing impact as a result.

Layout Requirements

Unlike English, Arabic is written from right-to-left, which can significantly impact the formatting of the final translated text – especially for websites and graphics. Far from simply realigning a text, tables and charts will often need to be reordered and reversed. As Arabic uses a different script from Latin alphabet languages like English, issues from font adaptation to correct character encoding need to be considered so that the text displays properly.

In website translation, when characters aren’t properly encoded, they may display as blank boxes. These can make the text difficult to read and don’t look very professional. Having a native linguist take care of your Arabic formatting avoids embarrassing mistakes like this.

Arabic Translation Services