App Instructions in Arabic: Rebuilding a Layout for Right-to-Left

A software company translated its app instructions into five languages. Four versions were fine. The Arabic one broke, and it was not a translation problem.

The company was preparing instructions for its application in five languages. The translations came back on time, but once the Arabic text was placed into the original layout, two problems appeared at once.

What went wrong

• The Arabic text ran longer than the frames allowed and spilled past the page boundaries.
• The text itself ran right to left, but the icons and screenshots stayed where they were in the left-to-right original, so instructions and visuals no longer matched.

Neither issue is a translation error. The layout was built for left-to-right languages, and a right-to-left language needs a layout that mirrors it.

What we did

• Rebuilt the whole layout for right-to-left: text direction, alignment, page flow, and the position of icons and screenshots.
• Chose a font that fully supports Arabic, so letters join correctly and nothing falls back to a mismatched system font.
• Re-fitted the text frames so the longer Arabic copy fits without cutting or overlapping.

The result

The Arabic instructions now read naturally and match the visuals, and the client could launch in a market that matters to them. For agencies, the lesson is to flag right-to-left languages at quoting stage: RTL is a layout job as much as a translation job, and planning for it early avoids a second round of fixes.