By Cairo Studio, Studio 6 min read
Most of what we build ships in two languages. MASAR in Cairo, 32 Real Estate and Buna Holding in Saudi Arabia, Burj Jiwar in Mecca. In every one of them, a large part of the audience reads Arabic first.
The usual approach is to build the English site, then set the direction to right to left and paste in a translation. It renders. It is also obvious, within a second, that nobody designed it.
Mirror the reading, not everything
Flipping the layout is the easy part. The real work is the list of things that should not flip. Numbers still read left to right. Phone numbers, prices and dates need to stay intact inside an Arabic sentence. A video timeline moves the way time moves, not the way text does. Arrows that mean next have to turn around, arrows that mean up do not.
Type needs its own decisions
An Arabic face set at the same size as its Latin partner almost always looks smaller, and its line height has to make room for marks above and below the line. So the Arabic gets its own scale and its own leading, chosen by eye on real copy, not inherited from the English.
Then there is mixed text. Brand names, product codes and technical terms stay in Latin inside an Arabic paragraph. They have to sit on the same line without jumping, and without the punctuation drifting to the wrong end.
Rules we now start with
- Never split Arabic into letters for an animation. The letters join, and splitting them breaks the word.
- Write the Arabic copy, do not only translate it. Egyptian readers notice stiff text immediately.
- Test every page in Arabic with real content before calling it done.
- Give each language its own type scale.
Why it matters
A bilingual site tells the reader which language the company thinks in. If the Arabic version only exists because someone flipped a switch, the Arabic reader can tell, and they draw the obvious conclusion about who the company is really for.
