How is an Arabic press release written from scratch?

A press release exists to make an announcement clear, credible and usable. The starting point should therefore be the news itself: what happened, why it matters, who is involved, what can be verified and what the intended reader needs first.

If an English release already exists, it can still be a source of facts. The question is whether its structure should also become the structure of the Arabic release. Sometimes it should. Sometimes the Arabic is stronger when the same facts are organised differently.

The first paragraph should establish the announcement quickly: the organisation, the action, the significance and the essential facts. Decorative introductions or long contextual build-up make a release harder to use.

Writing directly in Arabic makes it easier to decide where emphasis belongs without preserving the order of an English sentence simply because it came first.

A strong release usually moves from the announcement to the most useful supporting detail, then to context, quotations and background. That order should serve the story rather than mirror the paragraph sequence of another language.

This becomes especially important when the English version relies on long sentences, stacked clauses or a delayed explanation that becomes heavy in Arabic.

Executive quotations are often the most visibly human part of a press release. If they are translated too literally, they can become formal statements that no real executive would naturally say.

The Arabic should preserve the speaker's meaning, level of authority and intended emphasis while sounding like a plausible quotation in Arabic. Facts and commitments must remain exact, but sentence shape and rhythm may need to change.

Organisation names, titles, programmes, products, technical terms and recurring institutional language should be decided before the release is drafted. Changing them halfway through creates inconsistency and makes later approvals harder.

Where an approved Arabic form already exists, the release should use it. Where it does not, the decision should be recorded so the next release does not have to solve the same problem again.

Alignment means that both versions communicate the same facts, commitments and core message. It does not require every sentence to have a direct counterpart or every paragraph to appear in the same order.

A release can therefore be closely aligned in substance while allowing each language to use the structure and expression that make the communication clearest.

Writing directly in Arabic is especially useful when the Arabic audience is important in its own right, when the English draft is still evolving, when quotations need a distinctive voice or when the source structure would force awkward Arabic.

Close translation can still be the right choice when the approved source is final, tightly controlled and already structured in a way that travels cleanly. The decision should follow the communication need, not a fixed preference for one method.

A simple workflow keeps the release accurate without making it dependent on an English draft.

• Confirm the announcement, approved facts, names, figures and claims
• Identify the primary audience and the main news point
• Fix titles, organisation names and recurring terminology
• Draft the headline and opening around the news value
• Build the supporting detail in the order that reads most clearly in Arabic
• Write or adapt quotations in the speaker's voice without changing substance
• Review the full release for accuracy, flow, terminology and coherence
• Compare against any English version for factual alignment, not sentence-by-sentence symmetry

In the Arabisation Framework, this kind of work brings Purpose, Meaning, Expression, Voice, Structure, Terminology and Coherence together. The objective is not to avoid translation. It is to decide whether Arabic needs to be translated, rebuilt or written directly from the brief.