Here is a familiar way to make a bilingual ad. Shoot the English film, lock the edit, send the script to a translator, drop Arabic subtitles on top and flip the end card. Everyone signs it off by Thursday. The Arabic audience then watches a film that was clearly made for somebody else.
At iklipse we deliver Arabic and English versions of every cut, so the second version gets a lot of my attention. My view is plain: the Arabic cut needs someone who owns it from the script onwards, with the authority to change things the English team thought were finished.
Translation starts too late in most plans.
By the time a script reaches a translator, most of the decisions that matter are already made. The joke, the pacing, the casting, the way the product is shown. A translator can carry meaning across a language. They cannot reshoot a gesture or recast a family.
So bring the Arabic lead in at the script stage. Their job is to hear the idea as an Arabic speaker would and flag what will sound stiff or translated. Some lines need rewriting from scratch. Some scenes need a different beat. A line that lands quickly in English can run longer in Arabic, or shorter, and the edit has to make room for it.
Casting, gesture and pacing are part of the language.
Say you are selling a family car in Riyadh and Dubai. This is a hypothetical example. The English script has a father making a dry aside to his teenage son at the wheel. In Arabic, the same moment might need a different relationship, a different register or a different person saying the line. Who speaks to whom, how close they stand, how a host greets a guest: an audience reads those details before it reads the subtitles.
Cultural fit comes from people who know the audience, which I have written about before. Pacing belongs in the same conversation. Some English ads run on quick cuts and clipped lines. An Arabic version of the same film may want longer holds and a warmer voiceover. Neither is better. They are two films answering one brief, and each should be directed with that in mind.
Right to left changes the frame.
Arabic reads right to left, and the eye follows. Supers, end cards, product placement and even the direction a character walks can work against the viewer if they are copied straight from the English layout. Plan the Arabic frame on its own terms:
- Leave space for Arabic type, which often needs different sizes and line heights to read well on a phone.
- Check where the logo and the offer sit once the text changes direction.
- Decide whether movement in the shot should follow the reading direction.
- Use a proper Arabic typeface chosen with the brand, with correct letter joining in every super.
- Have a native reader check every frame of on-screen text, including the legal lines nobody else reads.
Give the Arabic version its own approval.
The failure I would design against is approval by proxy. The English cut gets rounds of careful comments from the brand, and the Arabic cut gets a glance from whoever on the client side happens to read Arabic, on the way to launch.
Treat the Arabic version as a separate deliverable with its own sign-off. Name the person who approves it. Give them the script, the cut and the on-screen text together, with enough time to push back. If the brand has an Arabic copy lead or a regional team, they should see the Arabic cut at the same stage the English team sees the English one. The day before launch is too late for useful comments.
AI production makes this easier to afford. When shots are built rather than filmed, changing a gesture, a background or a piece of casting for one market is a change in production, with no return to set. That makes it realistic to give the Arabic film different scenes where it needs them. The tools make the second version possible. Someone still has to direct it.
I wrote earlier that your strategy needs a passport. Your films need one too, along with a director who has actually been to the country.