Almost every regional communications brief asks for Arabic and English. Almost every one budgets for the English programme and treats Arabic as a delivery format.
Different outlets, different audiences, different news judgement
Arabic-language business media and English-language regional media serve overlapping but distinct readerships, and they do not consider the same things newsworthy. A story that leads in one may not run at all in the other. Treating them as a single distribution list guarantees that one of them is being served material that was not written for it.
Register matters more than vocabulary
Translated corporate copy tends to preserve the words and lose the register. The result reads as competent and imported. Material written natively carries the cadence and formality conventions that signal the author understands the audience, which no amount of terminology accuracy replaces.
Spokespeople need preparing twice
An executive fluent in both languages is still not equally prepared in both. The framing, the examples that land and the questions likely to be asked all differ. Media training that covers only the English scenario leaves half the exposure unrehearsed.
What this costs
Doing this properly means two sets of writing, two sets of relationships, and often two sets of measurement. It is meaningfully more expensive than translation, and it is the difference between being present in a market and being audible in it.
Ganesh Sharma
