Arabic Translation: Important things to know if you consider to translate texts into Arabic.

The Arabic language is a Semitic language that dates for more than 2500 years ago. Actually, it is one the oldest surviving languages in the world, a mother tongue of over 400 million people, and 30 modern dialects alongside the historical formal modern standard Arabic.

The answer to this question can be complicated. There are many factors that will determine the Arabic version needed for your translation. The first question is how formal is your text?

In most Arabic-speaking countries modern standard Arabic is the accepted version, and the most used form of Arabic for legal documents like governmental documents, medical documents, contracts, website content, etc.

However, in other industries, local dialects might be implemented.

In order to illustrate the complexity of this, I will take the advertising industry as an example. The advertisement industry tends to use the local dialects in some cases, while they prefer modern standard Arabic in other cases.

Although many advertisements are translated into the local dialect this majorly depends on the subject of the advertisement, the country, and the customers. Food advertisements are a good example to take to further explain the point.

One of the major factors that will be determining the version of Arabic is time. In the past, it was very dislikeable that an ad would run in a local dialect as it might be considered a low-level and thus low-quality product. As pan-Arabism was on its rise in the 50s- mid-’70s we could clearly see that MSA, as a uniting factor for all Arabic-speaking countries, was the exclusively used version of Arabic.

In this ad, we can see that coca-cola choose the modern Standard version of Arabic to introduce its product. Modern Standard Arabic has a special trait compared to the local dialects, it is automatically perceived as a serious and authoritative message by the Arabic reader. This cultural trait will be discussed later. Coca-cola, choose to introduce this product in this way in the past. This helped to establish authority among the public. Furthermore, this helped Coca-Cola to better understand the local market and the communication ports with it.

It is the clean and Pure Drink- another old Coca-Cola ad in Modern Standard Arabic.

We can see that in the past, Coca-Cola tended to use Modern Standard Arabic as its main Arabic version. However, nowadays Coca-cola tends to use local dialects more often in its ads.