Arabic-first is not translation

A translated product is an English product with Arabic strings. Customers recognise it immediately: arrows pointing the wrong way, prices in one digit style and phone numbers in another, a name form that demands a "last name", a friendly brand that suddenly sounds like a government notice — and an SMS bill two or three times what the English plan assumed. None of these are translation errors; they are design decisions nobody made. This piece uses Arabic as the worked example, but the same checks apply to Hebrew, Persian and Urdu (also right-to-left) and, for SMS encoding, to almost any non-Latin script — Hindi, Thai, Chinese, Greek, Cyrillic and more.

Right-to-left is not a mirror image of an English page. Some things flip — reading order, alignment, the direction a progress bar fills, which way a back arrow points. Some do not — a play button, a clock, a logo, a phone number, embedded Latin text.

The mistake is treating direction as a text attribute: set dir and hope. Instead:

• Declare direction at the document level (dir="rtl" and the language) so browsers and screen readers handle it correctly.
• Use CSS logical properties everywhere: inline-start rather than left, margin-inline rather than margin-left. A stylesheet written this way mirrors correctly without a second stylesheet; one written with physical properties needs a mirror sheet that drifts within a few releases.
• Decide icons one by one. Icons that imply direction (arrows, back, progress) mirror; icons that do not (clock, play, logo) must not. There is no automatic rule.
• Test mixed content. Arabic sentences containing English product names, numbers or URLs are where bidirectional text breaks.

Arabic content may use Western digits (0–9) or Eastern Arabic digits (٠–٩), and usage varies by country, sector and even brand. Many commercial interfaces in the Gulf use Western digits; Eastern Arabic digits are common in other contexts. The mistake is not choosing "wrongly" — it is mixing them in one interface, such as a price in one style and a phone number in another on the same screen. Decide per market, document it, and enforce it in formatting functions rather than in copy.

Arabic often uses fewer characters than English for the same meaning but can render wider, and diacritics and connected letters change line height. Layouts tuned to English string lengths break either way. Test with real content, not placeholder text, and test the longest realistic string rather than the average.

Standard SMS uses the GSM-7 alphabet, which covers Latin letters and common symbols. Any character outside it — every Arabic letter, but also many emoji and some accented letters — switches the whole message to UCS-2 (Unicode) encoding.

A worked example. An English delivery notice of 150 characters is one message. A faithful Arabic translation of about 140 characters is three parts (140 ÷ 67, rounded up), so it costs roughly three times as much per send. Rewritten for Arabic from scratch in 66 characters, it is one message — and usually reads better. At a million messages a month, that difference is a budget line.

Two practical rules: write Arabic templates to the Arabic limit rather than translating to it, and check English templates for stray Unicode characters (a curly apostrophe or an emoji) that silently switch them to UCS-2 as well.

Modern Standard Arabic reads as formal: right for a bank's terms, distant in a support chat. Dialect reads as familiar but regional — a Gulf dialect can feel foreign in North Africa, and vice versa. A workable split: official notices, terms, receipts and anything with legal weight in Modern Standard Arabic; conversational support and prompts in the register your customers actually use, which varies by market. This decision needs a native speaker who knows the market, not a translation vendor's default. Other languages have the same choice in different forms — formal and informal "you" in many European languages, honorific levels in others.

• Names. Fields that assume "first" and "last" are often wrong for Arabic names, which may include a father's or grandfather's name, a family name, or none of these in the expected order. Prefer a single full-name field unless you have a specific reason.
• Calendars. The Gregorian and Hijri calendars are both in use in parts of the Arab world; Iran and Afghanistan use the Solar Hijri calendar. If customers will compare your dates with official documents, know which calendar those use.
• Addresses and phone numbers. Formats differ by country; validate per market, not against a Western pattern.

On WhatsApp, each template language is a separate approved record, so the Arabic version is reviewed on its own — another reason to write it natively rather than translate. Test how right-to-left text, numbers and buttons render on both Android and iPhone, and in RCS where you use it.

In many markets, including much of the Arab world, a business's customer relationship already lives inside a messaging app. An interface or message that reads as foreign does not just lose a little conversion; it signals that the product was not built for that customer. Correct direction, consistent numerals, single-segment templates and the right register are visible within the first screen, and every one is cheaper to decide early than to migrate later.

For the market structure around Arabic-language messaging, read regional messaging in the Gulf. For writing templates that are approved per language, see a WhatsApp template strategy; for sender registration in the region, getting messages into the Gulf.