Building AI That Works in Arabic
Arabic is dialectal and reads right to left. Build for that from the start and you get much better results than translating later.
A lot of "Arabic support" is an English product with a translation layer bolted on. It works in a demo and falls apart in real use, because Arabic is not English written backwards.
What makes it hard
The written form and the spoken form differ. Dialects change from one country to the next. Text reads right to left, which affects the interface as much as the model. Names, dates, and numbers all have their own rules.
Build for it early
- Test with real dialect data, not translated English.
- Design the interface right to left from the first screen.
- Keep a native speaker in the review loop.
Why it matters here
For a company working across the GCC, Arabic is not a nice-to-have. It is most of the traffic. Treating it as a first-class language from day one is the difference between a product people use and one they quietly abandon.
