Preparing your experience
Mirroring an English layout and swapping the strings produces something that reads as foreign to every Arabic-speaking user. Here is what changes.
Aisha Al-Mansoori
1 min read
Most bilingual enterprise products are built in English and then translated. The layout is mirrored, the strings are swapped, and the result technically works. It also reads, to an Arabic-speaking user, as a product designed for someone else.
Physical direction in CSS is the root cause of most right-to-left defects. Replacing every physical property with its logical equivalent removes an entire class of bug, and it costs nothing in the left-to-right layout.
/* Breaks in RTL — the spacing lands on the wrong side */
.card { margin-left: 1rem; padding-right: 2rem; text-align: left; }
/* Correct in both directions */
.card { margin-inline-start: 1rem; padding-inline-end: 2rem; text-align: start; }Every component in our design system has an Arabic variant in the same file, reviewed at the same time. When a component is designed only in English and adapted later, the adaptation is always a compromise made under deadline pressure.
Lorem ipsum in Arabic tells you nothing. Test with genuine product names, real customer names, real addresses and real regulatory disclosure text, which is invariably longer than anyone allowed for.
“Arabic was designed alongside English from the first wireframe. Every previous supplier had treated it as a translation task and it always showed.”
The additional cost of designing both directions from the outset is, in our experience, around five per cent of design effort. Retrofitting it afterwards costs considerably more, and the result is never quite right.
Aisha Al-Mansoori
Chief Technology Officer
Writes on platform architecture, applied AI and the engineering economics of modernisation.
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