Arabic ad copy: what breaks when you translate an English ad

Arabic ad copy is advertising text written in Arabic for a specific reader, in a register that reader recognises, and laid out right to left. A translation from English can be right word by word and still be copy that no native speaker would write.

Do translated ads underperform? No UAE study we could verify measures it, so this post won't quote a percentage. What it can show is the kind of error that costs credibility, because an Arabic reader notices each of them straight away and an English-speaking marketing team usually can't see them at all.

What does a word-for-word translation get wrong?

Three things at the level of a single phrase: the construction, the verb and the gender. None of them is a spelling mistake, which is why a spell-checker will pass all three.

The gender row is the one that costs most for some brands. A translation defaults to one form without asking who the ad is for, and for a women's salon or a ladies-only gym the masculine default reads as an ad written for someone else. Decide the audience first, then write to her, to him or to the group, or rephrase so the ad doesn't address you directly.

Which Arabic should an ad use, Modern Standard or Gulf?

Use Gulf-flavoured Arabic for most consumer ads and Modern Standard for government, finance and legal copy, then let a native writer set the balance for your brand. Modern Standard Arabic is the formal written register used across the Arab world, and Khaleeji Arabic is the family of Gulf dialects people speak. A consumer ad in pure Modern Standard can read like a notice from a ministry, while an ad in heavy dialect can feel wrong coming from a bank or a law firm.

Take the word welcome. All four of these are correct Arabic, and they don't suit the same brands.

What changes when the layout flips right to left?

Five things: reading order, numbers and Latin letters, letter spacing, fonts and text length. Each one can look fine in a design file and wrong on a phone.

• Reading order. The eye starts on the right, so a logo, headline and button placed by English habit look backwards, and arrows that point forward need to point left. The glossary entry on right-to-left layout covers the rules.
• Numbers and Latin letters inside Arabic sentences. A price, a percentage or a brand name in English letters can reorder or lose its punctuation when the line is set right to left, so check every line on a real phone and not just in the design file.
• Letter spacing. Arabic letters join, and adding space between them to match an English style pulls words apart. Leave the tracking at zero.
• Fonts. Many English display typefaces have no Arabic letters, so the platform substitutes a default and the ad looks pasted together. Choose a typeface designed for both scripts.
• Text length. The same message often takes a different amount of room in Arabic, so fixed text boxes break. Leave space, and check the longest version.

Designing a right-to-left website goes deeper on the same problems for pages, and the ad version is the same job on a smaller canvas.

Do cultural references travel?

Often they don't, and sometimes even the names don't. Amazon Ads describes White Friday as the Middle East's November shopping event, beginning on the Friday after US Thanksgiving, which puts it in late November. Black Friday copy translated word for word can miss that the regional event is branded White Friday.

Idioms rarely survive either. A sports metaphor, a pun or a joke built on an English phrase has to be replaced with something that does the same job in Arabic, not rendered. That replacement is a writing task, which is why the person doing it should be a writer first and a translator second.

Who should write it, and how do you check it?

A native writer who works in the register your audience uses, starting from your brief and not from the English sentence. We work in English and Arabic with native Arabic writers and never machine-translate. A machine is useful for one thing here: letting a non-Arabic speaker read what an ad says. Arabic AI: what breaks on Gulf Arabic explains where models go wrong.

The wider picture is in Arabic marketing in the UAE, and our Arabic SEO service and paid media work both start from copy written in Arabic, not translated into it.

Before you commission anything, work out whether you need Arabic ads at all. The UAE government portal says only that expatriates outnumber UAE nationals and that Arabic is the official language, and no official share of Arabic speakers has been published that we could trace. Count the language of your last hundred enquiries instead. If every one arrives in English, test a small Arabic ad set before you commit budget.

Run this check today. Show the ad to two native readers separately, and ask each to read it aloud and rewrite the one line that sounds least like something they would say. If both pick the same line, rewrite it. If they pick different lines, ask your writer why each choice was made.