Software Business in the Middle East

Time to time I get questions about software localization into Arabic language before starting marketing and sales in the Middle East, and if it makes any sense at all . I would better put my thoughts on it in this post.

First of all, you would differentiate United Arab Emirates from other Arabic countries. I guess UAE is the only Arabic country where 85% of residents are expats who will never be citizens of the country. As a result, the commonly used language everywhere is English although the official language is Arabic of course.

It is another story in Saudi Arabia. The majority of population there are locals, but still I have met only couple people there who didn’t feel comfortable speaking English. In all other cases I have never had any problems speaking English on the meetings or over the phone.

It is not so often I see a Web site in Arabic – but I guess it’s because I do not have Arabic language installed on my computer so I get English page by default. Another reason I do not often see Arabic language on the Web is because I am mainly interested in IT and Healthcare where English is kind of de facto standard language.

As a result, I see no reason to translate our software into Arabic – all doctors and pharmacists speak English, and their major books are written in English too. Several times we got requests from our customers to add patient counselling leaflets in Arabic. When patient comes to a pharmacy, he gets medications together with the print out of instructions on how to administer those medications. In this case pharmacist would have a choice to print out the leaflet either in English or Arabic.

Another example – our partner for software development in Egypt. They have several major products like Point of Sale for small groceries, small rental cars agencies and so on. Arabic language support is essential for them because they sell only in Arabic countries and you might have hard time finding people in those small firms speaking good English. And also, since our partner company is owned by Arabs and Arabs are working there, the support of Arabic language is natural thing for them.

Localization into Arabic might be technically difficult because they write from right to left. It means all your controls would know how to present Arabic text correctly, all the labels would jump over to another side of your text boxes and icons would be able to change their positions too.

So what’s the conclusion? If your software is for the niche where English is widely used, then I don’t think you would need to localize it – at least localization would not be in your priority one list. But if you have software for housewives who might have troubles with English then probably you would consider localization pretty seriously.

In a common case I would start localization from a product’s Web site, or at least from having couple pages in Arabic that describe the product. When it’s done you might use Google AdSense in Arabic to promote your product in this region. Later your customers will let you know if they want to have Arabic version of your product. Otherwise it’s way too easy to spend a lot of time and money for localization and do not get enough sales to even cover your expenses.

There is at least one thing you would do before you start sales of your product in the Middle East – check with your translation agency if your product name doesn’t mean anything bad in Arabic. Otherwise you might end up with the situation when you have your product called “Pajero” that in translation might mean “Wanker”.

Dialects in Arabic

Finally, a lit bit more about dialects in Arabic language. There are several major groups of dialects. Sometimes people speaking one dialect cannot understand people speaking in another dialect of Arabic. But the most important thing for software is that dialects are used only in speaking, not in writing, so written Arabic is the same everywhere. It means you have to translate your product to Arabic only once avoiding translation to all widely used dialects.

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