While I was living in the Middle East, I bought a smart lock. The manual inside the box was printed in English on one cover and Arabic on the other. The English was fine, but the Arabic was broken.
The problem wasn’t the translation. Every Arabic letter was standing on its own instead of joining to the letters next to it, which to anyone who reads Arabic looks as wrong as an English sentence printed with spaces between every letter. On top of that, the letters ran left to right, so every word was backwards.
And it still went into the box and out to customers in an Arabic-speaking market. I don’t know whether it went through a production team or whether machine output went straight into the artwork, but either way the result is the same.
Why It Happens
Arabic is a cursive script. Most letters change shape depending on whether they’re at the start, middle or end of a word, or standing alone. That shaping isn’t stored in the text itself. The text is saved as plain characters, and it’s up to the software to join the letters and lay the line out right to left when it displays them.
If the text goes through software that doesn’t do that, you get exactly what’s on this manual. It usually happens in one of these ways:
- Arabic pasted into InDesign without the World-Ready Paragraph Composer turned on
- A font with no Arabic characters, so the software falls back to one that can’t join the letters
- Text copied out of a PDF and pasted into a new document
- Design and CAD software that was never built to handle Arabic
Some people try to fix it by pasting in pre-shaped Arabic characters. That can look right on screen, but the text can’t be searched or copied properly, and it often breaks again in other software.
Why Nobody Caught It
If the manual went through a normal production process, everyone along the way probably checked it and approved it. The designer placed the text and it looked like Arabic. The project manager checked the proof and it looked like Arabic. To someone who doesn’t read the script, there’s nothing to notice.
A typo in English gets caught because everyone involved reads English. Broken Arabic only gets caught by someone who reads Arabic, and usually nobody like that sees the final artwork. The translator saw the text weeks earlier, in a spreadsheet or a translation tool, before it was ever laid out. Running the text back through a translation tool won’t help either, because the words themselves are correct. The problem is in how they’re displayed.
On a manual, the cost is a reprint. On packaging or anything regulated, it can be a recall. And the customer who opens the box notices right away.
What Reading the Script Gets You
Catching broken letters is only part of it. Someone who reads the language can also:
- Choose an Arabic font that pairs well with the English one and stays readable at the same size
- Decide where lines should break and when to use a kashida, the stretched stroke used to justify Arabic text
- Handle English brand names, phone numbers and model numbers inside Arabic sentences, which is where a lot of layouts go wrong
- Know when a layout should be mirrored and when it shouldn’t, such as a photo with a logo in it
- Spot a translation that’s been cut off in the middle of a word
What I’d Suggest
You don’t need a native speaker for every language in a project. I’ve typeset over 130 languages and I only read a few of them. But somebody needs to be able to read the finished artwork before it goes to print, whether that’s the typesetter or a reviewer in the target country.
For Arabic, Farsi, Urdu and Pashto, I can be that person. I read and write Arabic and have been typesetting right-to-left languages since 2005.
If you have a document in a script nobody on your team reads, send it to me and I’ll let you know if anything is wrong with it.
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