Company Glossary and Style Guide for Arabic Translation
The Short Answer
If your company translates into Arabic more than a few times a year, a company glossary (also called a termbase) and a short Arabic style guide are the cheapest quality control you can buy. They stop the same job title, product or clause from appearing three different ways across contracts, HR letters, tenders and the website.
A glossary lists your terms and their approved Arabic equivalents. A style guide sets the rules the terms sit in: tone, numerals, dates, how your company name appears, and what never gets translated. Together they let any translator, in-house or external, produce text that reads as one voice.
Why Inconsistency Costs More Than It Looks
- Legal risk. If “Services” is defined once as “الخدمات” and later rendered “الأعمال”, a reader can argue they mean different things. Our article on legal terms machine translation gets wrong shows how small word choices change obligations.
- Rejected files. Authorities compare names across documents. A company name or a signatory’s name spelled two ways can stall a licence amendment or a bank file.
- Brand damage. Product names and slogans that change from one campaign to the next look careless to Arabic-speaking customers. See brand names lost in translation.
- Wasted review time. Without agreed terms, every reviewer re-argues the same choices.
What Goes in the Glossary
| Category | Examples | Tip |
|---|---|---|
| Legal entity names | Your company, subsidiaries, regular counterparties | Copy the Arabic name exactly as on the trade licence, including the legal form |
| People and titles | Directors, authorised signatories, job titles | Fix one Arabic spelling per person, matched to the Emirates ID |
| Departments and units | Finance, Legal, HSE, Procurement | Keep the same Arabic name on letters, organisation charts and signatures |
| Products and services | Product lines, service names, packages | Decide: translate, transliterate or keep in Latin script |
| Defined contract terms | Agreement, Services, Effective Date, Confidential Information | Use the same rendering in every template |
| Industry terms | Technical, financial or medical vocabulary | Add a definition or reference so the choice is clear |
| Do-not-translate list | Trademarks, software names, codes | State it explicitly |
Each entry should carry the English term, the approved Arabic term, a short note on context, a rejected alternative if there is a common wrong version, and who approved it and when.
What Goes in the Style Guide
Keep it to two or three pages, or nobody will read it:
- Register. Formal Modern Standard Arabic for legal and official text; whether marketing copy may be warmer.
- Numerals. Western (1, 2, 3) or Arabic-Indic (١، ٢، ٣) digits, and the same choice everywhere.
- Dates and currency. Day-month-year order, Hijri dates if you use them, and how to write “AED”.
- Company name rules. When to use the full registered name and when a short form is allowed.
- Addressing the reader. Second person or impersonal; gender-neutral phrasing where possible.
- Punctuation and layout. Arabic comma and question mark, right-to-left tables, and how mixed English terms appear in Arabic sentences.
Building It: A Practical Workflow
- Harvest. Pull recurring terms from your best existing Arabic documents: licence, MOA, standard contracts, HR letters, website.
- Decide. Have one Arabic-speaking owner in the business (often Legal or Communications) approve each term with the translator.
- Store. Keep the glossary in a spreadsheet or, better, in the termbase of a CAT tool so translators see the approved term as they work. Our CAT tools course covers termbases and translation memory.
- Share. Give the same files to every translator and agency you use, and ask them to flag terms they think are wrong instead of silently changing them.
- Review. Check new translations against the glossary before release, and log every change with a date.
- Update. Review the glossary when your licence, structure or product names change.
What a Glossary Cannot Do
A glossary governs your own terms; it cannot change the meaning of a source document. Under the UAE translation law, a registered translator must translate accurately without altering the content, so a certified translation of an official document follows that document, even where your glossary prefers different wording. If a government document spells your company name differently from your trade licence, fix the source with the issuer; see name spelling mismatches.
Staff who translate or review Arabic on the job benefit from shared training as well as shared files; see corporate language training.
What is the difference between a glossary and a style guide?
A glossary lists your terms and their approved Arabic equivalents. A style guide sets the writing rules around them: tone, numerals, dates, names and what stays untranslated.
How many terms should a company glossary start with?
Start small: company and entity names, signatories, job titles and the defined terms in your standard contracts. Add terms as real documents raise them.
Should the Arabic company name follow the trade licence?
Yes. Use the Arabic name exactly as on the trade licence, including the legal form, so names match across licences, contracts and bank files.
Who should approve glossary terms?
One Arabic-speaking owner inside the business, working with the translator. Shared ownership without a final decision maker leads to the same arguments on every document.
Can a translator ignore my glossary?
For your own materials they should follow it and flag disagreements. For a certified translation of an official document, the source text governs over your preferred terms.
Is a termbase the same as translation memory?
No. A termbase stores approved terms; translation memory stores whole sentences already translated so they can be reused. CAT tools use both.
How does a glossary save money?
Fewer review rounds, fewer corrections after release and reused approved text. On a monthly volume it pairs well with a retainer arrangement.
How SWLT Helps
We build glossaries and style guides from your existing documents, keep them for every job we translate for you, and apply them across contracts, HR documents, tenders and websites. For regular volumes, see monthly retainer vs per-page translation.
Disclaimer
This article is general information. It is not legal advice. Laws, procedures and fees change; confirm current requirements with the Ministry of Justice or the authority concerned, and take professional advice on your own case.
Start Your Company Glossary
Send us a few representative documents and your trade licence, and we will propose a first glossary. Smart World Legal Translation – Sole Proprietorship L.L.C. (SWLT) is a UAE Ministry of Justice-licensed legal translation company in Abu Dhabi and Dubai, led by Dr. Hani Elimam. Our federal accreditation is accepted across the UAE, including by Dubai Courts, and we hold exclusive interpretation contracts with the UAE Federal Courts and the Federal Public Prosecution. Arabic⇄English legal translation is AED 60 per 200-word page (excl. VAT), with same-day delivery available. Send your documents on WhatsApp (+971 50 864 8439), email info@swlt.ae, or use our contact page.