A resort site we built this year runs in English, Turkish and Arabic. The first two are a translation exercise. The third is a design exercise, and teams routinely discover that on the week they planned to launch.
Mirroring is a layout decision, not a text one
Setting the document direction flips the text, and that is where most implementations stop. But the page is full of directional meaning: a back arrow, a progress bar that fills, a card whose image sits beside its label, a carousel that advances. All of them have a natural reading direction, and in Arabic that direction reverses.
Modern CSS makes most of this free if you write it that way from the start. Logical properties — inline-start rather than left, margin-inline rather than margin-left — mirror themselves. Retrofitting them into a site built with physical properties is a week of finding the twenty places that did not mirror, usually by eye, usually late.
The parts that must not mirror
Some things stay put. Numbers, times and dates keep their direction. Phone numbers do too, and so do brand marks and media controls, where play still points forward regardless of the script.
- Prices, dates and phone numbers: left to right, always.
- Logos and product screenshots: never mirrored.
- Icons that describe the physical world, like a play button, keep their direction; icons that describe the interface, like a back arrow, flip.
Typography does not carry over
Arabic sits differently on the line. It needs more line height than a Latin face at the same size, its letterforms are taller relative to the cap height, and a display weight tuned for a European sans can read as shouting. Budget for a second type scale rather than assuming one set of numbers works for both.
Copy is the expensive part, and the part that gets cut
Machine translation will get you a site that reads as though it was translated, which tells a guest exactly how much you wanted their booking. Pay a person who lives in the market to write the important pages: the homepage, the thing you are selling, and every error message. Nobody forgives a clumsy error message.
What it actually costs
Planned from the start, the third language adds perhaps a tenth to the build: logical properties, a second type scale, and a translation pipeline that does not need an engineer. Added afterwards, it is closer to a third, and the result usually looks like what it is. If a market matters to you, decide before the first screen is designed.