Bilingual Arabic–English websites: eight mistakes Qatari businesses make

Why this matters in Qatar

Qatar is one of the few markets where a single-language website leaves a large share of potential customers slightly out of reach, whichever language you choose. Most residents are expatriates, and English is the working language of much of the business world. Arabic is the official language, the language of Qatari customers, and the one many organizations and government-linked buyers work in first.

That is why so many Qatari websites have an Arabic version. The problem is how many of them have an Arabic version that was clearly an afterthought: a mirrored layout with broken spacing, a font that makes Arabic look cramped, and copy that reads like a translation, because it is one. Visitors notice within seconds. The eight mistakes below are the ones we see most often, and every one of them is avoidable if it is planned before the design starts rather than patched after launch.

1. Mirroring the stylesheet instead of designing for right-to-left

Setting dir="rtl" on the page flips the direction of text and flexible layouts, and that is where many projects stop. It is only the beginning. A layout built with fixed left and right margins, absolutely positioned elements and direction-specific icons breaks in ways a quick look at the homepage will not reveal.

• Use logical properties. Styles written as margin-inline-start rather than margin-left follow the reading direction automatically, so one stylesheet serves both languages.
• Flip what points, not what represents. Arrows, “next” chevrons and progress indicators should reverse. Logos, play buttons, checkmarks, clocks and product photos should not.
• Isolate mixed-direction content. Phone numbers, prices, email addresses and English brand names inside Arabic sentences need bidirectional isolation, or punctuation and digits end up in the wrong place.

2. Treating Arabic type like Latin type

Arabic is a connected script with its own proportions. A font chosen for the English design, with Arabic falling back to whatever the device has, produces pages that look accidental. Choose a typeface designed for Arabic on screens — families such as IBM Plex Sans Arabic, Noto Naskh Arabic or Tajawal are common, freely licensed starting points — and pair it deliberately with the Latin font.

Then adjust the rules. Arabic usually needs a slightly larger size and more generous line height to stay readable. Letter-spacing should be left alone, because it can break the joins between letters. Uppercase transforms do nothing, since Arabic has no case, and synthetic italics look distorted. Headings that were designed around short English words often need a different line length in Arabic.

3. Translating instead of localizing

A translation reproduces sentences. Localization reproduces intent. The difference shows most in headlines and calls to action, where a literal rendering of a clever English line is usually flat or odd in Arabic. Arabic copy also runs at a different length, so a layout that fits the English exactly will need room to breathe.

Most business websites in Qatar use Modern Standard Arabic for the main copy, with vocabulary that feels natural to Gulf readers. Whatever you choose, the Arabic should be written or at least reviewed by a native writer. Unreviewed machine translation is the fastest way to tell Arabic-speaking visitors that the version in their language was not a priority.

4. Putting both languages on one URL

A language switch that swaps text with JavaScript while the address stays the same is convenient to build and poor for search. Google needs a distinct, crawlable URL for each language version in order to index and rank it. Give each language its own address — a subfolder such as /ar/ is the simplest to manage on one domain — and make sure every page has an equivalent in the other language, not just the homepage.

Set the lang and dir attributes on each version, too. Google determines a page’s language from its visible content, but browsers, screen readers and translation tools rely on these attributes to behave correctly.

5. Getting hreflang almost right

Hreflang annotations tell Google which language version to show to which searcher. They are also easy to get subtly wrong, and a half-working setup can be worse than none. The rules that matter most:

• Every version lists every version, including itself. If the English page points to the Arabic one but not back, Google may ignore the pair.
• Use valid codes. ar-qa and en-qa for Qatar-specific versions, plus an x-default for everyone else.
• Canonicals point to themselves. The Arabic page should not declare the English page as its canonical; that tells Google to drop it.
• Pair equivalent pages, not an Arabic page with the English homepage because the translation was never finished.

Our own site runs this way — an English U.S. version, an English Qatar version and an Arabic Qatar version, each pointing to the others — so the setup can be inspected before anyone commits to it.

The rules are in Google's guide to localized versions of your pages: every version must list itself and all the others, and links that are not returned are ignored.

6. Forgetting the invisible parts

The pages everyone reviews get translated. The parts nobody opens during review usually do not, and customers meet them at the worst possible moment: when something goes wrong, or when they have just paid.

• Form labels, placeholders and validation messages, including a phone field that accepts the +974 format with eight digits
• Order confirmations, password resets and every other automated email
• Error pages, empty search results and out-of-stock notices
• The cookie banner, privacy policy and terms
• Page titles, meta descriptions, image alt text and social sharing previews

7. Mixing numbers, dates and currency

Arabic text can use Western digits (0–9) or Eastern Arabic digits (٠–٩). Both are seen in Qatar, and many Gulf websites use Western digits throughout for consistency with prices and phone numbers. Choose one and apply it everywhere, including in the checkout. Show prices in a consistent format, such as QAR 1,250 in English and 1,250 ر.ق in Arabic, and remember that the working week in Qatar runs Sunday to Thursday, which matters for anything that promises delivery dates or response times.

8. Doing keyword research in one language

People searching in Arabic do not type translations of English queries. They use different phrases, different levels of formality, and sometimes English product names within Arabic searches. Translating your English keyword list gives you an Arabic version optimized for searches nobody makes. Research each language separately, write each version’s titles and headings for its own searches, and track performance per language.

Which platform handles this best?

Both main options can do it well when set up deliberately. On WordPress, multilingual plugins such as WPML or Polylang, or a carefully built separate page tree per language, can produce clean URLs and correct hreflang; the quality depends far more on the theme and its right-to-left support than on the plugin. On Shopify, languages are managed through the platform’s own translation tools, and the critical check is whether your theme explicitly supports right-to-left languages — not all do. In either case, test the Arabic checkout on a real phone before launch.

A short pre-launch checklist

• Every page exists in both languages, at its own URL, with correct lang and dir
• Hreflang is reciprocal and includes x-default; canonicals are self-referencing
• Icons that indicate direction are flipped; logos and images are not
• Arabic typography has been reviewed at mobile sizes
• Forms, emails, errors and legal pages exist in both languages
• A native speaker has read the Arabic in its final layout, not in a document

Frequently asked questions

Planning a bilingual site? Our Qatar page explains how we build Arabic and English versions, and what a bilingual build costs in Qatar covers the budget side.