How should a website be Arabised rather than simply translated?

Buttons, menu items and form labels are short, repeated and highly visible, which makes inconsistency obvious. A single English label such as Submit can reasonably become several different Arabic verbs depending on what is being submitted, so the choice has to be made deliberately and then held across the site.

Microcopy such as validation messages and empty states is often left in English or handled last. Arabic readers meet these strings at the exact moment they are trying to complete something, so they carry more weight than their length suggests.

Arabic sentences frequently run longer than their English source, which affects headline wrapping, card heights, button widths and navigation. A heading that fits on one line in English may need to be rewritten rather than allowed to break awkwardly.

Where an English page opens with a stacked series of short taglines, an Arabic version often reads better with fewer, fuller statements. This is an editorial decision made with the design, not a compromise applied after it.

Page titles, meta descriptions, image alt text and structured data are part of the site's content. When they are skipped, the Arabic site is harder to find and harder for automated systems to describe accurately, even though the visible pages look complete.

• Unique Arabic page titles and meta descriptions
• Alt text written in Arabic and describing the image, not the file
• Consistent Arabic terminology in headings so pages remain scannable
• Canonical and language annotations that reflect the real site structure

The final stage is reading the Arabic site as a visitor would: entering from the homepage, following the main journeys and completing a form. Problems that are invisible in a spreadsheet of strings become obvious in sequence, and this is usually where the last inconsistencies are removed.