Almost every product sold here says it supports Arabic, and most of them do, in the sense that the buttons have been translated. Then real records go through it and things start coming out sideways, and by that point you have signed.
Here is what actually breaks, roughly in the order I meet it.
The layout is the part everyone expects and the smallest problem
Arabic reads right to left, so the screen mirrors. Menus move to the other side, tables run the other way, buttons swap places. Modern software handles that reasonably well without being asked.
What does not handle it is everything built on top: the report somebody designed in a hurry, the printed invoice, the email that goes to the customer. Latin words and digits inside an Arabic sentence run in one direction inside a line running the other, and that is where things arrive out of order. A phone number with the country code on the wrong end is the one you will notice. There are others you will not.
Names and addresses stop fitting the boxes
A form with a box for first name and a box for last name is a decision somebody made in another country. Arabic names do not divide that way, people write their own name differently depending on the document, and the same customer turns up as three records inside a month.
Addresses are worse. A great deal of what gets delivered here is found by building name, landmark, makani number or a post box, none of which fits a form asking for a street and a house number. Then the same person appears in Arabic on one document and in English on another, with nothing in the system to say they are one person.
Search is where it really shows
One name is spelled Mohammed, Mohamed, Muhammad or Mohd depending on who typed it. In Arabic the same word appears with and without the small marks above and below the letters, with different forms of the first letter alef, with two different letters at the end of a great many words, and with the word for the joined onto the front of it.
Type it one way, get nothing back, conclude the customer is not in the system, create them again. That is how a customer list doubles. It is the most common Arabic complaint I hear about business systems, it is solved, and it costs a few days of work. It is almost never in the requirements.
The documents that leave the building
Printed and emailed documents are where a bilingual system embarrasses you in front of a client. Letters that do not join up properly because of the font. A PDF that comes out with the columns reversed. An invoice where the Arabic and the English do not line up. A quotation with the client's own name mangled across the top.
This happens because the screens were tested and the documents were not, and because whoever signed off the test read the English version. Ask for a real invoice on paper, a real statement by email and a real PDF opened on a phone, all in Arabic, before you accept anything.
AI that has mostly been tested in English
Models handle Arabic far better than they did three years ago and they still handle it less well than English. The gap shows up where you care about it: handwriting, older scanned documents, the dialect people write in when they message your support line rather than the formal Arabic a model has seen most of, and sentences that switch between Arabic and English halfway through, which is how a lot of people here write.
It shows up in what comes back, too. An assistant can be accurate and still answer a customer in a register that reads as odd or too familiar. A score will not catch that. It needs somebody who speaks the language to sit and read a hundred of its replies.
How to find out before you sign
Do not accept a demonstration in English and a promise about Arabic. Take your own records, the awkward ones, and put them through the product while you can still walk away.
- Fifty real customer names in Arabic, including the ones your own staff always spell differently
- A handful of real addresses that are not simple street addresses
- A badly scanned document, a photographed one, and one with handwriting on it
- A real invoice and a real statement, printed and emailed, then opened on a phone
- Half a dozen messages written the way your customers actually write, mixing Arabic and English
- A search for one customer whose name three people have typed three different ways
Have that done by somebody who speaks Arabic as a first language and does the job every day. Not a manager being polite about a supplier, and not the vendor's own team.
None of it is exotic and all of it is cheaper to find in the fortnight before you sign than in the month after go-live. We have bilingual systems in daily use here, and the pattern is consistent: the Arabic problems that hurt are small, specific and predictable, and they only ever get found by testing on real records. If you are evaluating something now, the list above is a morning's work and it will tell you more than any feature comparison.
Working through this on a live programme?
A 45-minute call with the engineer who would run the work. We will tell you whether AI is the answer, including when it is not.