Giving Arabic its own rulebook
Co-writing the Arabic edition of Emirates NBD’s UX Writing Style Guide, adapting each rule to how Arabic actually works instead of translating the English one.
Overview
Emirates NBD has an English UX Writing Style Guide that sets the house rules for every screen. Titles and buttons in sentence case. Verbs on buttons. Enter for text fields and Select for dropdowns. Dates written as 12 Oct 2026.
The UX writing team is now writing the Arabic edition, and I’m one of its authors.
The problem
Many English rules have nothing to hold on to in Arabic.
Arabic has no capital letters, so a rule about sentence case doesn’t mean anything. Punctuation conventions like the Oxford comma don’t carry over. And banking terms that are settled in English often have several possible Arabic renderings, where only one is the term UAE banking actually uses.
A line-by-line translation of the English guide would hand Arabic writers rules they can’t follow, and leave out the decisions they make every day.
A style guide is a set of decisions. Translating the sentences doesn’t translate the decisions.
My role
- Co-writing the Arabic edition with the UX writing team. I own the sections on personality and tone of voice, and on writing goals.
- Expanding the English guidelines as new patterns come up in live work.
- Applying both guides across banking flows, including Arabic banking and legal terminology.
The approach
For each English rule, the question is what it’s for. Once that’s clear, the Arabic edition can keep the purpose and set its own rule for reaching it, or drop the rule where Arabic doesn’t need it.
Tone gets the same treatment. A voice that sounds direct and friendly in English can sound abrupt in Arabic, or overly formal when translated word for word. The tone sections describe how the bank should sound in Arabic, with Arabic examples, rather than describing the English voice and asking writers to approximate it.
Terminology is where precision matters most. On a cheque screen, the bank the cheque is drawn on is البنك المسحوب عليه. A looser phrase can leave a customer unsure which bank the screen means, which is the one thing a cheque screen can’t afford.
The guide also connects to the shared English–Arabic UX writing library I proposed for the design system, where approved copy in both languages is ready to use in designs.
Where it stands
The Arabic style guide is in progress.