Maghreb

Three Languages, One Press Release

Writing a release that has to run in Arabic, French and English at once is a different job than writing one and translating it twice.

Imen Bliwa

A press release built for one market and then translated twice tends to arrive in the second and third languages a little apologetic — technically correct, and clearly not written for the room it's now standing in. A release built to run in three languages from the start reads differently, because the writer had to solve for all three readers before committing to a single sentence.

The formal register problem

French institutional writing tolerates a level of formality that reads stiff in English and, depending on the audience, either respectful or distant in Arabic. A release that hits the right register in French and gets translated as-is will usually land too cold in English and ambiguous in Arabic — not wrong, just calibrated for the wrong room.

The facts travel easily. The register is the part that actually has to be rewritten, not translated.

What actually changes between versions

The headline order, the quote selection, and how early the "so what" appears all shift by language, sometimes significantly. An English release often wants the news in the first line; a French one can afford a beat of context first; an Arabic release frequently wants the source's credibility established before the claim. None of that is a rule you learn from a style guide — it's a rule you learn from watching three versions get read by three different newsrooms.

The workflow that actually holds up

Draft in parallel, not in sequence — three writers, one shared fact sheet, one deadline — then reconcile afterward against the one thing that has to match across every version: what the release is actually claiming. Everything else is allowed, and often needs, to differ.