Running a bilingual board in Arabic and English
Most Gulf boards deliberate in Arabic and report in English. The governance risk is not translation quality, it is which version is the record.
How should a bilingual board handle its records?
Decide, in writing and in advance, which language version governs if the two ever diverge, and record decisions in that language first. Then produce the other version from the same record rather than maintaining two documents that drift apart.
- Which version governs
- Two documents drift, one record does not
- What bilingual has to mean in software
- How Mithaq handles it
Which version governs
This is the question that has to be answered before it is tested. Many entities in the Gulf are constituted in Arabic, file in Arabic, and would find the Arabic text controlling in a dispute, while running their board in English because that is the working language of the executive team. The mismatch is manageable, but only if it is deliberate.
Write the governing-language rule into the board charter, apply it consistently, and note it on the face of documents that exist in both. A minute that carries "in the event of any discrepancy, the Arabic text prevails" has resolved in advance an argument that would otherwise happen at the worst possible moment.
Two documents drift, one record does not
The common arrangement is an Arabic minute and an English minute, produced separately, amended separately, and approved as though they were the same thing. Within a year they differ, usually in a detail nobody noticed, and the entity now has two records of the same meeting.
The alternative is one record with both language fields on each object: the decision text in Arabic and in English on the same decision, the agenda item in both on the same item. Rendering a document then becomes a view rather than a second source of truth, and an amendment cannot be applied to one language and forgotten in the other.
This also fixes the quieter problem: search. A board whose Arabic minutes are scanned PDFs and whose English minutes are text has, in practice, an English-only archive.
What bilingual has to mean in software
A translated interface is the shallow version. The deeper test is whether the data itself is bilingual, whether exports and PDFs render correctly right-to-left with proper Arabic typography, whether notification emails go out in the recipient's language, and whether search finds an Arabic term in an Arabic document.
Right-to-left layout is where most systems reveal themselves. Numbers, dates, mixed Arabic and Latin text in one line, and tables that have to mirror are all places where a bolt-on translation produces something that is readable but visibly not built for the language.
How Mithaq handles it
Mithaq supports Arabic and English fields on governance records and provides right-to-left interfaces for the published bilingual workflows. Required exports, PDFs, notifications and search behaviour should be tested with representative content during evaluation. This marketing site is served as two real URL trees, Arabic and English, with reciprocal alternates.