Six mistakes that make an Arabic site look translated

A Saudi visitor identifies a machine-translated website in about one sentence. What they conclude is not that your English is better than your Arabic. It is that you did not think the Arabic market was worth the effort — and that judgement is made before they have read anything you wanted them to read.

These are the six errors that give it away. Our approach to building both languages properly is on the web design page.

1. The copy was translated, not written

Arabic translated sentence-by-sentence from English keeps English rhythm. It is grammatically fine and reads like a form. Arabic marketing copy is structured differently, makes its case differently, and uses different proof.

Writing directly in Arabic costs more than running a translation. It is also the only version of the two that sounds like a person.

2. Latin typography, Arabic letters

Arabic script needs more line height than Latin, does not take negative letter-spacing — it is cursive, and tracking breaks the letter joins — and has no equivalent for most Latin display faces. Setting Arabic in a font chosen for English, at English leading, produces text that is technically readable and visibly wrong.

3. The layout was flipped, not mirrored

Flipping is not mirroring. A proper right-to-left layout moves navigation, icon positions, form labels, table columns and the direction arrows point. Half-mirrored pages are common: the text moves but the icons still point the wrong way, and the eye catches it immediately.

4. Numbers and Latin runs come out backwards

Numbers stay left-to-right inside right-to-left text. So do Latin words, model numbers and email addresses. Tools that were not built for bidirectional text get this wrong constantly, which is how you end up with a phone number whose country code has jumped to the wrong end, or a price where the currency has detached from the figure.

This one is worth testing specifically, because it survives review by anyone who does not read Arabic.

5. Only one language has been thought about for search

Arabic search behaviour is not English search behaviour translated. People phrase queries differently and use different words for the same product, and the competition for a term is often completely different in each language.

It is common for the Arabic version of a site to be the easier ranking win by a wide margin. Treating your keyword list as one set translated twice leaves that on the table — Arabic keyword research covers why.

6. The Arabic version is a second-class page

The tell is small: the English page has been updated and the Arabic has not, the contact form is only in English, the Arabic page is missing the newest service. Each is minor. Together they say the Arabic site is an obligation rather than a market.

What good looks like

Both versions authored, both maintained, both tested by someone who reads the language. The Arabic version gets its own copy, its own typefaces, its own line spacing and its own keyword research — and it earns its share of enquiries rather than existing so the site can claim to be bilingual.

That is how we build, and what a website costs explains where that sits in a quote. If you want it applied to your site, the web design page is the place to start.