Why your Arabic copy sounds foreign in Tunis

There is a version of Arabic that lives on brochures, in press releases and across half the region's websites. It is grammatically correct. It is also unmistakably borrowed — the register of a Gulf agency, applied to an audience in Tunis, Algiers or Casablanca that speaks and reads differently.

Modern Standard Arabic is a real, shared language, and there are contexts where it is exactly right. The problem is not MSA itself. The problem is treating it as a neutral default, and assuming that a translator who has never worked with a North African audience will land the same way as one who has.

What readers actually notice

Rarely the grammar. Almost always the vocabulary choices, the sentence rhythm, and the assumptions underneath: what needs explaining, what can be taken for granted, which institutions get named, which examples ring true. A Tunisian reader will finish the paragraph and come away with the impression that it was not written for them — without necessarily being able to point to the word that gave it away.

This is the part that no glossary and no machine solves for you. It is a judgement call made by someone who knows the audience, checked by an editor who also knows the audience — which is why we run every translation through both, in that order.

Three questions before you commission anything in Arabic

If the answer to the third one is nobody, that is the gap. It is also the cheapest one to close.