Open almost any corporate website in the UAE, switch it to Arabic, and you can tell within a second whether anyone designed that version or whether it was translated into an English layout.
Arabic-speaking visitors notice immediately. They rarely complain about it — they just trust the organisation slightly less, and nobody ever attributes the lost enquiry to typography.
Here is what actually gives it away — and it is the first thing I look at on any bilingual web project.
The direction is flipped but the design is not
Switching to right-to-left mirrors the layout, and a design that was never considered in mirror image starts to fall apart. Icons that implied forward now point backwards. Arrows on buttons face the wrong way. A logo that anchored the top-left is now floating in the wrong corner. Progress indicators run against the reading direction.
None of these is difficult to fix. They are only expensive to fix afterwards, because by then they are scattered across forty components.
The type is too small and too tight
This is the most common and most damaging one. Arabic letterforms carry more detail below and above the baseline than Latin ones, and they connect. At the font size and line height that look elegant in English, Arabic looks cramped and reads slowly.
Arabic usually needs a slightly larger size and noticeably more line height. Not a lot — but a site that uses identical values for both languages has demonstrably not been looked at in Arabic by anyone who reads it.
Text length was never accounted for
Arabic translations of English UI text are frequently longer, and sometimes much shorter. Buttons designed to fit “Get Started” break on the Arabic equivalent. Headlines that balanced in two lines become four. Card grids that were even become ragged.
A design that fits real Arabic text survives. One drawn around Latin dummy text does not.
Numbers, dates and mixed content
Latin numerals inside Arabic text, phone numbers, prices, dates, English product names, URLs — all of these sit inside a right-to-left flow and can reorder in surprising ways if the markup does not mark them properly. Everyone has seen a phone number rendered with its country code stranded at the wrong end.
The content is translationese
The deepest problem is not visual. Translated marketing copy reads as translated: English sentence structure wearing Arabic words, idioms that do not land, a register that is either stiffly formal or oddly casual.
It also fails commercially. Arabic search uses different phrasing from English search, so translated pages target words nobody actually types. If a large share of your buyers search in Arabic, translating your English keywords is leaving the easier half of the market alone.
What Arabic-first actually means
Not building the Arabic site first. It means both languages being real inputs to the design:
- The layout is checked in both directions before it is signed off, not after launch
- Type scale and line height are set for each language rather than shared
- Components are built with logical CSS properties so mirroring is automatic rather than a second stylesheet, which is standard practice in the WordPress builds I do
- Copy is written in Arabic where it matters, not translated — at minimum the headlines, the calls to action and the service pages
- Arabic keyword research is done separately, and Arabic pages are allowed to differ from their English counterparts
- hreflang tells search engines the two versions are the same page, so they consolidate rather than compete — which matters more now that ranking and being recommended are separate jobs
The test
Give the Arabic version of your site to someone who reads Arabic natively and does not work for you, and ask one question: does this look like it was made for me, or made for someone else and handed to me? You will not need to ask a second one.