Field

Tunis, in Three Languages at Once

Working across English, French, and Arabic in the same afternoon isn't three translation jobs. It's one job that happens to run through three different sets of instincts about how a sentence should end.

Mohamed Bliwa

Three overlapping arcs in bronze, cream, and white over navy, evoking three languages meeting — Original artwork — StoryBridge

By ten in the morning a typical brief here has already touched three alphabets. A client brief arrives in French, the reference material is half in English, and the audience it all has to land with reads Arabic first and skims the rest. Nobody on the team treats that as three separate jobs stacked on top of each other. It's one job, and the hard part isn't the vocabulary — it's that English, French, and Arabic don't agree on where a sentence is allowed to end.

Right-to-left is a layout problem exactly once

The first surprise for anyone new to trilingual production is how small the RTL problem actually is once you've built for it correctly — a mirrored grid, numerals that stay left-to-right inside an Arabic paragraph, a logo that doesn't secretly assume left alignment. Get that plumbing right one time and it stays right. The layout was never really the hard part.

The hard part is that a sentence built to persuade in French can read as evasive in Arabic, and reassuring in English can read as condescending in either.

What actually moves between languages

Register does more damage than vocabulary. A French press release can lean formal without anyone blinking; an Arabic reader will read that same formality as either respect or distance depending on who's speaking and about what; an English draft of the identical fact can sound almost too casual to trust. None of that shows up in a bilingual dictionary. It shows up in the fifth draft, after someone on the team has read all three versions aloud and noticed that only two of them actually sound like they're talking to the same person.

Working the way the day actually works

So the working rhythm isn't "translate, then localize" as two sequential steps. It's closer to writing the same brief three times, independently, with the same facts and the same deadline, and then checking afterward that the three versions still agree with each other on the one thing that has to survive translation: what the reader is supposed to walk away believing. Everything else — word order, sentence length, whether a line breaks left or right — is allowed to differ, because it has to.