A communications background, applied to Arabic
Thaer Hasan is an Arabisation and Arabic communications specialist based in the United Arab Emirates. He works with organisations, agencies, executives and individuals who need Arabic that is accurate, natural and built around what the content is meant to achieve.
The gap Thaer identified
Working across communications and translation made a recurring problem clear. Content would arrive accurately translated and still fail to do its job. The Arabic was correct, but it carried the shape of the English behind it: the same headline structure, the same sentence length, the same assumptions about what the reader already cared about.
Arabisation is the response to that gap. It starts by asking what the communication needs to achieve in Arabic, then considers the Arabic itself and the project as a whole. Some passages should be translated closely. Others need to be adapted, restructured, rewritten or replaced with something written directly in Arabic.
Corporate communications in the UAE
Thaer's professional grounding is in corporate communications in the UAE, working with leading communications companies and marketing agencies. That environment shapes how he approaches Arabic content. Communications work is judged on whether a message reaches the right audience in the right register at the right moment, and on how it reads when it is quoted, shared or repeated without the surrounding context.
It also means he is used to working inside a process: briefs, approvals, deadlines, spokespeople and the practical constraints of a campaign. Arabic content rarely exists on its own. It sits inside a launch, a report, a website release or a media plan, and it has to arrive in a usable state.
Original Arabic writing and ghostwriting
Thaer writes Arabic press releases, op-eds, features, executive content and thought leadership from scratch. This is a different craft from translation. It starts with a brief or a conversation, not a document, and it requires holding a named person's voice steady across a piece that will be published under their name.
He has also Arabised websites and marketing materials, where the same principles apply across many small pieces at once: navigation, interface text, headlines, captions and metadata all need to agree with one another.
Official translation for diplomatic missions
Earlier in his career, Thaer carried out official translation work supporting the UK, German and Brazilian diplomatic missions in Istanbul. Documents in that setting leave no room for approximation. A term is either right or it is not, and consistency matters as much as accuracy, because the same wording will be read again by someone making a decision.
That discipline still governs the technical side of his work: fixing terminology early, applying it without drift and treating names, titles and figures as facts to be verified rather than text to be rendered.
Oxford and programme-level thinking
Thaer holds a master's degree in Major Programme Management from the University of Oxford. That training is about how large, complex bodies of work hold together, and it maps directly onto Arabic content at scale. A large Arabisation project is a programme: it has dependencies, a terminology baseline, multiple contributors and a review stage that determines whether the parts agree with one another.
A business perspective on content
He also holds an MBA from GTU in Istanbul. Content is rarely commissioned for its own sake. It exists to support a launch, a reputation, a funding round, a recruitment drive or a market entry, and the Arabic version has to serve that same objective rather than simply exist alongside the English.
In practice this means asking what the content is meant to change before asking how it should be worded, and being willing to say when a piece does not need Arabisation at all.
- Based in
- United Arab Emirates
- Languages
- Arabic, English
- Education
- MSc, Major Programme Management, University of Oxford; MBA, GTU, Istanbul
- Sectors
- Corporate communications, marketing agencies, diplomatic translation
Gulf market and cultural insight
Arabic-speaking audiences are not one audience. Expectations shift by country, sector, platform and seniority, and a register that reads as confident in one context reads as overfamiliar in another. Judging that correctly is part of the work, not a finishing touch applied at the end.
Thaer also advises ventures entering Gulf markets on communications and Arabisation. That advisory work sharpens the audience side of every project, because it forces the same questions early: who is being addressed, what they already believe, and what would make them act.
Thaer's approach
The practical consequence of all of this is that Thaer works at project level rather than file level. Decisions about terminology and tone are made once and applied everywhere, and the final review reads the whole body of content together rather than piece by piece.
- One set of terminology and tone decisions across a project
- Translation, rewriting and original Arabic writing used as each section requires
- A final editorial review of everything together, not of isolated files
Who he works with
Thaer works with organisations, communications and marketing agencies, executives, founders, professionals, ventures, established companies and individuals with public-facing or professional projects. The common factor is that the Arabic matters to the outcome, not the size of the client or the sector they operate in.
Some engagements are a single piece written under a named person's byline. Others run across an entire launch, where the website, the campaign and the media material all have to sound like one organisation. The services page sets out what each of those involves.
Work with Thaer
The services page explains what each type of project involves. If you already know what you need, go straight to the enquiry section.