Translation and Localisation for Technology Companies in the UAE — SaaS Contracts, PDPL Privacy Policies and Arabic Product Localisation

They are two different jobs. Localisation adapts the product itself into Arabic and right-to-left — the interface, marketing site and help centre — and is as much engineering as language, with the register chosen for your audience. Translation renders the paperwork behind the product — the SaaS agreement, licence, DPA, NDA and privacy policy — precisely and in full, in formal Arabic that holds up legally. Most technology companies entering the UAE need both, run as separate workstreams and kept aligned by one termbase so the product and the documents use the same words.

It depends on where your entity is established. Companies onshore, and in free zones that do not have their own data law, come under the federal Personal Data Protection Law (Federal Decree-Law No. 45 of 2021), which also reaches the data of people in the UAE from abroad. Entities inside the Dubai International Financial Centre follow the DIFC Data Protection Law No. 5 of 2020, and entities inside the Abu Dhabi Global Market follow the ADGM Data Protection Regulations 2021. The regimes differ in detail — including breach-notification timing — so the answer shapes your privacy notice and DPA. Confirm your specific position with a UAE privacy lawyer and the UAE Data Office.

If you serve Arabic-speaking users, providing an Arabic version is the practical way to meet the transparency principle — that notices be in plain, clear language people can actually understand. This is compliance practice rather than a single explicit article, and we present it as such. A bilingual privacy policy and terms of service also reduce disputes about what a user agreed to. We render the Arabic in readable, plain language while keeping the legal meaning intact, and match the vocabulary to your DPA and consent screens.

No. Arabic is a right-to-left language, so the interface has to be mirrored — layout, navigation, icons and alignment re-engineered, not simply reversed — and then tested with an Arabic typeface for line breaks and rendering. Dates, numbers and currency are reformatted to local expectation. Skipping this is the classic mistake that produces a "flipped", broken interface. Because it is engineering as much as language, product localisation runs as its own workstream, separate from the legal translation of your contracts.

For interfaces and marketing, Modern Standard Arabic gives formal, pan-Arab reach and is the usual default; but a consumer-facing product or campaign aimed at the UAE may lean to a Gulf voice for warmth and familiarity, and Gulf Arabic differs from Levantine in expression and tone. It is a deliberate branding decision, validated by native speakers. One firm rule cuts across it: legal and contractual text — licences, terms, policies — stays in formal Modern Standard Arabic regardless, because there the register is fixed by the document's purpose, not chosen for the audience.

With a termbase and a translation memory. A termbase fixes your approved terms at the level of the word — the product name, "Service", "Personal Data", "controller", "processor" — so each is rendered the same way everywhere. A translation memory works at the level of the sentence, reusing previously approved passages when the same or a similar one recurs, which is common across policy versions and release notes. Industry references treat a well-kept termbase as one of the biggest levers on both consistency and speed. We set it up on your first project so every document and later version inherits the same decisions.

No — they answer different questions. ISO 17100 is a voluntary international process standard for translation services; it describes disciplines like terminology management and a two-step revision by a second qualified person, with an audit trail, and it speaks to how consistent and traceable the work is. Registration of a legal translator with the UAE Ministry of Justice is a licensing matter: it determines whether a court, notary or government body will accept the translation at all, and in the UAE it is held per language pair and renewed in fixed terms. A serious provider can speak to both, but neither replaces the other.

Possibly, yes. If a contract governed by UAE law ends up in dispute before an onshore court, Arabic is the language of the courts, and a foreign-language document is translated into Arabic by a legal translator to be admissible; where a bilingual contract conflicts, the Arabic version generally controls onshore. Inside the DIFC and ADGM free zones the courts work in English, so an English contract is enforceable there without Arabic. Which world your contract lives in decides the answer — so it is worth settling before signing, not after a dispute begins. Confirm the position for your contract with a UAE lawyer.

Confidentiality is treated as a condition of the work, not an afterthought. We scope it before the file arrives, keep proprietary technical, source and pre-release material to the people who must see it, and are ready to work under your own NDA. There is a legal backbone to this in the UAE too: under the federal law regulating the translation profession, a registered translator is bound to keep the confidentiality of what passes through their hands, and disclosure of confidential information is treated as a serious professional breach. Where you need it, we handle the enterprise document set as a single controlled workstream rather than scattered files.