The Italians have a saying: traduttore, traditore. Translator, traitor. Even the saying proves its own point: in English it loses the rhyme, and the rhyme was half the joke.
Most bilingual work in our region is written once and translated once. You can feel it. The English sounds stiff, or the Arabic sounds borrowed. One audience is always reading a copy, and a copy never moves anyone.
Languages do not just use different words. They move differently.
Arabic carries a music and a weight that English can flatten. English has a punch that Arabic can make too polite. Humour lives in rhythm, emotion lives in sound, and neither survives being carried across word by word. A great line in one language often becomes a merely correct line in the other. Correct is never enough.
Don't ask what the line means in Arabic. Ask what an Arab would have said.
The brief is the feeling, not the sentence
Translation starts from the words. Writing twice starts from the feeling. Agree first on what the line must make people feel, then let each language find its own way there. Sometimes they meet in the same place. Sometimes the best Arabic line has no English twin, and that is fine. Some lines should simply stay in the language they were born in.
When I wrote the She's Mercedes pledge, I wrote it twice, as two originals: ما الذي سيوقفنا؟ and "What can stop us?!" The same belief, in two native voices. Parts of it went on to live in the brand's global communication.
How to write in two languages
- Write the feeling first, before either version.
- Draft each language from scratch, in its own rhythm.
- Let each version keep its own best detail, even if the other one does not have it.
- Read both out loud. If nobody would say it, it is not finished.
- Test each version with native ears, not with the person who wrote the other one.
And now, the machines translate
AI can translate anything in a second, and it is getting very good at meaning. That makes the human job clearer, not smaller. When literal translation is free, the value moves to the thing machines still struggle with: knowing what a person in Jeddah, Cairo or Beirut would actually say, and why it would make them smile.
Bilingual is not a translation budget. It is two audiences, each of them deserving to feel the work was written for them first.
