Arabic on the web

First Edition translates to and from most of the world’s languages, with English, French, German, Spanish and Italian its top five most translated. But these don’t fully represent the most spoken, which are Mandarin, Spanish, English, Hindi and Arabic. Interestingly, despite Arabic being the 5th most spoken language in the world, less than 1% of internet pages are in Arabic.

This can be partly explained by the historic difficulties with limited fonts and scripts, as well as the current issues around censorship, income and computer access. And English is still the most frequently used language online, despite the native languages of the majority of users.

But having your website translated into Arabic can be highly beneficial. As with all languages, however, it is extremely important to understand and respect the cultural differences and sensitivities. It can be easy to cause unintended confusion or even offence, so the translation should always be carried out, and where possible checked, by a native speaker of the particular area for which the text is aimed. It is also important to remember that you may need to do some localisation as well as translation and don’t forget the SEO!

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