Building for Arabic, French and English without three websites

Tunisia does business in three languages, often in the same sentence. Serving all three from one site is very doable. It just has to be a decision made early rather than retrofitted.

Right to left changes more than text

Flipping dir="rtl" mirrors the layout, and that is the easy part. The traps are the details: an arrow icon that now points backwards, a carousel that scrolls the wrong way, a logo that ends up on the wrong side.

The fix is to stop thinking in left and right. Use logical properties, start and end, and the layout mirrors itself.

Fonts are not interchangeable

A Latin typeface with an Arabic fallback looks exactly like what it is. Arabic deserves a face designed for it, sized to sit comfortably next to the Latin text it shares a page with.

Translate meaning, not strings

A machine-translated homepage tells visitors you did not think they were worth the effort.

Marketing copy carries idiom and rhythm. Run it past someone who speaks the language commercially. It is a small cost against the impression it leaves.

One codebase, three audiences

• Localised URLs so each language is indexable on its own.
• hreflang tags so search engines serve the right one.
• Language choice remembered, never guessed at on every visit.