How to Run Surveys in Arabic and Other Languages (RTL Guide)

Running a survey in Arabic is not a matter of pasting your English questions into a translator and flipping the text direction. Arabic is a right-to-left language with its own grammar of politeness, its own numeral systems and its own cultural expectations around how questions are framed. For teams across Saudi Arabia, the UAE and the wider Gulf and MENA region, getting this right is the difference between a survey that feels native and trustworthy and one that feels foreign and is quietly ignored. This guide covers right-to-left layout, natural Arabic wording, bilingual design, numerals and testing.

• Why Arabic surveys deserve special care
• Getting right-to-left layout right
• Writing natural Arabic question wording
• Designing bilingual surveys
• Numerals, scales and dates
• Translation and cultural adaptation
• Testing before you launch
• Frequently Asked Questions

Why Arabic surveys deserve special care

Across the Gulf and the broader MENA region, Arabic is the language of trust. A respondent who receives a survey in awkward, machine-translated Arabic, or in a layout where the text runs the wrong way and the buttons sit on the wrong side, reads a clear signal: this was not made for me. Response rates fall and, worse, the people who do answer may be a skewed, more English-comfortable slice of your audience, biasing your results. Treating Arabic as a first-class language rather than an afterthought is both a courtesy and a methodological necessity.

The region is also genuinely multilingual. A survey in the UAE may need to reach Arabic speakers, English-speaking professionals and large South Asian communities at once. That reality makes bilingual and multilingual design a core skill, not an edge case. Teams building research for these markets, whether through a survey maker in Saudi Arabia or for audiences in other Gulf cities, need tooling and habits built for right-to-left from the ground up.

Getting right-to-left layout right

In a correct right-to-left survey, everything mirrors. Text aligns to the right, the reading flow moves from right to left, progress bars fill from right to left, and navigation buttons swap sides so that "next" sits on the left where the eye naturally arrives. Radio buttons and checkboxes move to the right of their labels, and list numbering counts from the right. When these details are wrong, even fluent Arabic readers feel a subtle friction that makes the survey tiring to complete.

A few specifics trip teams up. Numbers and embedded English or brand names remain left-to-right even inside Arabic text, which is correct behavior known as bidirectional text; your survey tool must handle this automatically rather than forcing the whole line one way. Punctuation such as the Arabic comma and question mark are mirrored characters and should render in their Arabic forms. Choose a font that renders Arabic script cleanly at the sizes you use, since Arabic letters connect and need a little more vertical room than Latin text to stay legible. The safest path is a platform with genuine native RTL support, so the mirroring happens correctly without manual CSS surgery.

Writing natural Arabic question wording

Good Arabic survey wording is usually written in Modern Standard Arabic, which is understood across all Arab countries, rather than in any single dialect that might feel local to some and odd to others. Keep sentences clear and reasonably formal, since surveys carry a tone of respect, but avoid stiff, overly classical phrasing that ordinary respondents would not use. The goal is language that an educated reader anywhere from Riyadh to Cairo finds natural and unambiguous.

Watch grammatical gender, which Arabic marks far more than English. A question addressed to "you" must often choose a masculine or feminine form, and the polite, inclusive solution is usually to phrase questions so they work for any respondent or to use neutral constructions where possible. Be careful too with rating-scale labels: terms like "satisfied" and "agree" have natural, idiomatic Arabic equivalents, and forcing a literal translation of an English scale often produces wording that sounds wrong. Let a native speaker choose the scale terms that feel right rather than translating them word for word.

Designing bilingual surveys

Many Gulf surveys are best delivered bilingually, letting each respondent answer in the language they prefer. The cleanest approach is a single survey with a prominent language switcher at the top, so a respondent picks Arabic or English once and the entire survey, including layout direction, flips accordingly. Crucially, both versions must collect into the same dataset with aligned question identifiers, so that an Arabic answer and an English answer to the same question land in the same column for analysis. Splitting them into two separate surveys creates a reconciliation headache later.

Keep the two versions genuinely equivalent in meaning, not just in words. The same question should measure the same thing in both languages, with matching scales and matching answer options in the same order. When you report, you can still segment by language to check whether Arabic and English respondents answered differently, which is itself a useful signal about your audience. Teams serving cosmopolitan markets, for example with a survey maker in Dubai, lean on bilingual surveys precisely because their audiences are mixed by default.

Numerals, scales and dates

Arabic content can use two numeral systems: the Western Arabic numerals familiar in English (0 to 9) and the Eastern Arabic numerals used in much of the Gulf and Levant. Decide which your audience expects and apply it consistently; mixing them within one survey looks careless. For rating scales, remember that the visual direction reverses in RTL, so a scale that runs low-to-high left-to-right in English should run low-to-high right-to-left in Arabic, keeping the "good" end where Arabic readers expect it.

Dates and calendars deserve attention too. Parts of the region use the Hijri calendar alongside the Gregorian one, and date formats differ from Western conventions. If your survey asks about dates, offer the format your respondents actually use, and label clearly which calendar you mean. These details seem small, but they are exactly the cues that tell a respondent whether the survey was built for them or merely translated at the last minute.

Translation and cultural adaptation

The strongest Arabic surveys are adapted, not merely translated. The gold-standard method is to have one professional translate the survey into Arabic and a second, independent translator render it back into the original language; comparing the back-translation to the source reveals where meaning drifted. Where full back-translation is not practical, at minimum have a native-speaking reviewer who understands research, not just language, check that each question still measures what it was designed to measure.

Cultural adaptation goes beyond words. Some topics that are routine in one culture are sensitive in another, and examples, names and scenarios should reflect the local context rather than a foreign one. Response options should fit local reality too; a list of options that made sense for one market may need different categories for the Gulf. The aim is a survey that a local respondent experiences as having been written for them, because in effect it was.

Testing before you launch

Never launch an Arabic or bilingual survey without testing it on real devices with native speakers. Preview every question on a phone, since the vast majority of regional respondents are on mobile, and confirm that the right-to-left layout holds, that the language switcher flips everything cleanly, and that mixed Arabic-and-English lines render correctly without scrambling. Have at least one native speaker complete the whole survey and flag any wording that feels unnatural, any scale label that reads oddly, and any place where gendered phrasing excludes part of the audience.

Finally, run a small soft launch before the full distribution. Send the survey to a handful of representative respondents, watch the first responses come in, and check that answers are landing in the right fields and that Arabic text is stored and displayed correctly throughout your pipeline. Catching an encoding or alignment problem with ten responses is trivial; catching it after a thousand is a crisis. A little testing here protects the credibility of everything the survey is meant to measure.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can I just translate my English survey into Arabic with a tool? Machine translation is a starting point at best. Arabic surveys need native review for natural wording, correct gender handling and idiomatic scale labels, plus proper right-to-left layout. A purely machine-translated survey signals to respondents that it was not made for them, which lowers response rates and biases your sample.

What does proper right-to-left support actually include? Text aligned right and flowing right to left, progress bars and navigation mirrored, radio buttons and checkboxes on the right of their labels, correct bidirectional handling so embedded numbers and English stay left to right, and Arabic punctuation. A platform with native RTL support handles these automatically.

Should I run separate Arabic and English surveys or one bilingual survey? One bilingual survey with a language switcher is usually better. It lets each respondent choose their language while collecting both into a single aligned dataset, avoiding the reconciliation problem of merging two separate surveys, and it lets you segment results by language later.

Which Arabic should I write the survey in? Modern Standard Arabic is the safest choice because it is understood across all Arab countries, unlike a specific dialect that may feel local to some respondents and odd to others. Keep it clear and respectful rather than overly classical, and have a native speaker confirm the wording sounds natural.