Localizing for Arab: How to Localize for the Arabic Market?

Arabic and its various dialects are spoken by approximately 422 million speakers.

These numbers show a big opportunity for companies wanting to develop content targeted at Arabic-speaking audiences.

Corporations are identifying the need to localize their company websites, marketing campaigns, social media posts, etc. into this language to grab the attention of the Arab world.

Arabic localization is a great process where there is a huge importance of Arabic translation. Besides this, the process also involves the localization of graphics and other elements based on the Arab culture that helps them to reach.

In this guide, you will read about the best practices for localizing for an Arabic audience.

How to Localize for the Arabic Market?

You can imagine that Arabic localization needs a lot of research and preparation. If you want to launch your product with an excellent localization quality in the Arabic language, here are the best practices you can follow:

1- Know your target audience

Like every other language, Arabic has several dialects such as:

✓ Egyptian Arabic, spoken in Egypt.
✓ Iraqui Arabic, spoken in Iraq.
✓ Levantine Arabic, present in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Palestine.

And there are many more facts about Arabic.

Thus picking the suitable variant is crucial to marketing your products and services effectively. Because of this reason, your localization solely depends on the region where you are launching your brand.

Provided with the different variations in vocabulary, if you utilize Algerian Saharan Arabic when your product is highly available in Saudi Arabia, they may not know the text at all.

2- Avoid machine translation

Translating the English language into Arabic is tough. Arabic is the language of expression with poetic words, idioms and indirect characterizations to describe ideas and situations. Many terms, concepts, and phrases don’t have an exact match in English.

If you think accurate English to Arabic translation is easy, you are wrong. It’s actually very tough.

Arabic is an expressive language with indirect characterizations, poetic words, and idioms to describe several situations as well as ideas. Several phrases, terms and concepts don’t exactly match in English.

To save a lot of time and effort to put in the localization process, businesses rely on machine translation. However, you should not use machine translation because in this case, the possibilities of errors are high.

To gain the benefit of translation, hire a qualified native Arabic speaker who has the ability to translate text into Arabic so your content sounds accurate and authentic.

The translators at a prominent Arabic translation company in Noida have excellent localization knowledge and work hard to meet the expectations of the clients.

3- Focus on website layout, and functionality

Because of the nature of the presentation of text and images in Arabic, getting website design right is more challenging.

Although the Arabic language is read and written from right to left (RTL), it seems to be bi-directional while there are untranslatable words or phrases that will remain in the left to right direction.

If you want to make your website friendly for Arabic speakers, here are a few things you need to do that appeal to more Arabic speakers and quickly improve your online presence with localization–

✓ Change the direction of the text in the RTL direction.

✓ Reverse the product or site elements along with the RTL text

4- Pick the Right Images and Visuals

Visuals and images are the best way to connect with your target audience because they attract and encourage them to know about your brand.

But when it comes to the Arab markets, you have to be a little careful. Be cautious while portraying emojis, flags, or individuals in your website’s visuals.

According to the Arabic community, few images may be fully acceptable in some regions, while a strongly conservative audience may find them offensive.

Always make sure that your images are culturally right for your target audience when you are doing effective translation and localization. For instance, women are strongly expected to keep their hair coloured in some Muslim cultures.

Website having images or visuals of a woman with uncovered, short hair or a ponytail may be found offensive.

Summary

The Arab world brings plenty of opportunities for companies for faster global business expansion. However, with its several dialects and complexities, precisely localizing for Arabic can be a daunting task.

The above mentioned best practices are common and widely used by the Arabic translator while translating their clients’ sites. If you don’t have the ability to localize for Arabic, hand over this task to a professional company to localize your every content, product or service to Arab countries.

Finding a reputed company to handle Arabic localization? Let’s connect at +91-8527599523 or request a free quote.