Running WhatsApp in Arabic and English
You do not need to translate everything. You need to translate the right things, and get those right.
A perfume retailer in Sharjah told us their Arabic campaign performed worse than the English one, and asked whether Arabic was worth the effort. We read the templates. They had been run through a translation tool, the prices rendered backwards on an iPhone, and the opt-out line told Arabic readers to reply STOP in English. Arabic was not the problem. This is what doing it properly involves.
Roughly nine in ten people living in the UAE were born somewhere else. Your customer list in Dubai is Emirati, Indian, Pakistani, Filipino, Egyptian, British, Lebanese, Syrian — often in the same afternoon. English is the working language of most of the country, and Arabic is the official one, and the honest answer to "which should I use on WhatsApp" is: it depends who you're writing to, and you can find out.
This is a practical guide to running a bilingual WhatsApp channel — what to translate, what not to bother translating, how the right-to-left thing actually works, and how to decide a customer's language without asking them an awkward question first.
Don't translate everything. Translate the templates — the messages you send at scale — and let your team reply in whatever language the customer wrote in. Meta treats each language as a separate template, so submit both versions together. And get the Arabic written by a person, because machine-translated marketing is obvious to anyone who reads Arabic.
Where bilingual actually matters
Not everywhere, and this is the part that saves you work.
Templates matter most. These are your outbound messages — order confirmations, delivery updates, appointment reminders, promotions. They go to thousands of people, you write them once, and they represent your brand at scale. This is where the investment pays back.
Live replies matter least. When a customer writes to you in Arabic, your agent answers in Arabic. When they write in English, English. No system required — just a team member who can, or a translation tool for the rare case. Most UAE customer service teams already handle this without thinking about it.
Your bot sits in the middle. An automated flow — a menu, a qualification sequence — is worth building in both languages, because it fires when nobody is watching. A bot that only speaks English will lose Arabic-speaking customers at 11pm on a Friday, and you won't know it happened.
The practical rule: anything a machine sends should exist in both languages. Anything a human sends can follow the human.
Working out which language to use
You cannot ask "do you prefer Arabic or English?" before every message — it's clumsy and it delays the useful part. There are better signals.
Follow the inbound message. The strongest signal by far. If someone opens with Arabic, they want Arabic. Detecting this is not hard: Arabic script occupies a distinct Unicode range, so a message containing Arabic characters is an Arabic message. Store that against the contact and use it for everything you send them afterwards.
Ask once, in the welcome. A two-button reply — "English" / "العربية" — as the first interaction. It takes one tap, feels like service rather than a form, and gives you a definitive answer you can store forever. This is the cleanest method and we recommend it for any business with meaningful Arabic-speaking volume.
Use the source. If a lead arrived from an Arabic-language ad, an Arabic landing page or a Salla store selling in Arabic, start in Arabic. The channel already told you.
Don't guess from the name. This one gets businesses into trouble. Plenty of Arabic names in the UAE belong to people who work entirely in English, and plenty of non-Arabic names belong to fluent Arabic speakers. Guessing from a name is a coin flip that occasionally lands as an insult.
Whatever method you use, store the answer against the contact. Asking a returning customer their language again is worse than never asking.
Right-to-left, and what actually breaks
Arabic reads right to left, and the good news is that WhatsApp handles this properly on both iOS and Android. You do not need to do anything special for a normal Arabic sentence to render correctly.
What breaks is mixed content, and it breaks in predictable places:
- Numbers and prices inside Arabic sentences. "AED 289" sitting in an Arabic line can render with the currency and the figure in an order you did not intend. Test it on a real phone rather than trusting the preview in a dashboard.
- Order numbers and reference codes. Latin characters and digits in an RTL paragraph are the classic failure. Putting the reference on its own line usually fixes it entirely.
- URLs. Always put links on their own line in Arabic messages. A link mid-sentence is where RTL rendering gets ugly.
- Punctuation at the end. Trailing exclamation marks and full stops can jump to the wrong end of the line.
None of this is exotic. It just means someone who reads Arabic should look at each template on an actual phone before you approve it. Ten minutes, once per template, and it never bothers you again.
Arabic and English templates, ready to use
QuickWA ships with a bilingual template library written for the UAE — order updates, COD confirmations, appointment reminders, Ramadan and White Friday campaigns — in Arabic and English, with STOP handled in both. Billed in AED from AED 99/month.
Start free trial →How Meta treats the two languages
This trips people up on the first campaign. In Meta's system, a template is defined by its name and its language. "order_confirmed" in English and "order_confirmed" in Arabic are two separate templates that both need to be submitted and approved.
A few consequences worth knowing before you build:
- Approval is independent. Your English version can be approved while the Arabic one is rejected. Usually the reason is the translation not matching the declared category — an Arabic version that reads more promotionally than the English one gets classified differently.
- Variables have to survive translation. If your English template has three placeholders, the Arabic one needs the same three, and they must make grammatical sense in Arabic word order. This is where a literal translation falls apart — Arabic sentence structure will often want them in a different position.
- Submit them together. Otherwise you will find yourself needing the Arabic version on the day of a campaign and waiting for review.
Getting the Arabic right
Write in Modern Standard Arabic for anything written down. It is the register people expect from a business, and it reads correctly across the whole Gulf and beyond — Emirati, Egyptian, Levantine and Khaleeji customers will all read MSA comfortably. Dialect belongs in speech and in social media, not in an order confirmation.
Do not translate literally. English marketing copy is direct and short; Arabic business writing is more formal and slightly warmer, and a word-for-word rendering reads as blunt or odd. The message should be rewritten to carry the same meaning, not the same words. "Hey! Your order's on the way 🚀" is fine in English and wrong in Arabic.
Get a person to check it. Not because machine translation is useless — it is a good first draft — but because the failure mode is invisible to you and obvious to your customer. If nobody on your team reads Arabic, a freelancer will review twenty templates for less than the cost of one week of the ad spend you're about to run through them.
And keep emoji restrained. They work, they cross languages, but Arabic business communication is generally more formal than English business communication, and three emoji in an Arabic order confirmation reads younger than most brands intend.
The bits people forget
Opt-out has to work in Arabic. If you send an Arabic marketing message that says to reply STOP, you have technically provided a mechanism and practically provided a barrier. Accept the Arabic equivalents, and publish the instruction in the language of the message.
Your bot's buttons need translating too. An Arabic flow with English button labels is the most common half-finished bilingual setup we see. The buttons are the part people actually tap.
Business hours differ. The UAE working week is Monday to Friday, with Friday afternoons quiet for prayers, and the rhythm changes completely during Ramadan. Your away message should reflect the week your customers actually live in — this matters more than the language it's written in.
Name your templates so you can find them. Something like order_confirmed_en and order_confirmed_ar. Trivial, and it saves real confusion once you have forty of them.
Is it worth it?
Honest answer: it depends on your customers, and you can measure it rather than guess.
If you sell to Dubai's corporate and expatriate market, English will carry most of your volume and Arabic is a courtesy that occasionally wins a customer. If you sell to Emirati families, to the northern emirates, to government-adjacent businesses, or in categories like jewellery, abayas, perfume, catering and family services, Arabic is not optional — it is the difference between being a local business and being a foreign one.
The cheap way to find out: look at your last few hundred inbound messages and count how many arrived in Arabic. That ratio is your answer, and it is more reliable than any assumption about the market.
The bottom line
Translate the machine-sent messages, let humans follow the customer, ask the language question once and remember the answer, and have a real person check the Arabic on a real phone. That is most of it. The businesses that do this in the UAE are not doing anything clever — they are just not making their Arabic-speaking customers do the extra work.