Your site speaks English. Many of your customers don’t.

Which languages do customers in the UAE and India use?

In the UAE, Arabic is the official language, and road signs and shop signs are in Arabic and English. The government’s own portal also lists Bengali, Farsi, Malayalam, Turkish and Urdu among the other widely spoken languages, and says Indians are the largest foreign community (UAE Government portal, Fact sheet).

India has far more. The 2011 census grouped people’s answers into 121 languages, 22 of them listed in the Constitution. Hindi, with the dialects the census groups under it, was the mother tongue of 43.63% of people, followed by Bengali, Marathi, Telugu, Tamil and Gujarati at between 4.58% and 8.03% each. English was the mother tongue of 259,678 people out of more than 121 crore (Census of India 2011, Language, Paper 1 of 2018).

The census counts mother tongue, the language a person’s mother spoke to them as a child, so it says nothing about who also reads English. It does show which language people grew up in.

They search in it too. Google opened AI Mode, its conversational search, in Hindi in September 2025, then added Bengali, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu a month later, so people could ask “in their preferred language” (Google India Blog, 8 Sep 2025; Google India Blog, 8 Oct 2025).

For your business, ask something smaller: which language do your best customers use on WhatsApp? Start with that one.

Why does a translated page beat a translate button?

A translate widget, or the translate offer in a visitor’s browser, swaps the words on that person’s screen after your page loads. The page at your address stays in English. Two things follow.

First, search engines don’t see the translation. Google recommends a separate web address for each language version, instead of cookies or browser settings, and it judges a page’s language from the text a visitor can see (Google Search Central, Managing multi-regional and multilingual sites, 10 Dec 2025). A page that only turns Arabic on someone’s phone is, to Google, an English page. At most, Google may sometimes show it to an Arabic search with a machine-translated title and snippet (Google Search Central, Translated results in Google Search, 10 Dec 2025). The crawlers Vercel tested for ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity miss it too, because they don’t run scripts (Vercel and MERJ, The rise of the AI crawler, 17 Dec 2024).

Second, nobody checks what it says. The UAE government portal shows both approaches. Its fact sheet has a real Arabic page at its own address, set to read right to left. For other languages it offers Google Translate, with a note that the government “is not responsible for the accuracy” of the result (UAE Government portal, Fact sheet; the same page in Arabic). Your prices and terms deserve someone who will stand behind them.

Plugins that publish a real page at its own address count as translated pages.

How does Google handle each language version?

Google’s documentation asks for four things (Google Search Central, Managing multi-regional and multilingual sites; Google Search Central, Tell Google about localized versions of your page, 21 Sep 2026).

• Give each language its own address, such as yoursite.com/ar/ for Arabic and yoursite.com/hi/ for Hindi.
• Keep each page in one language, for the text and the menu alike. Google advises against side-by-side translations, and warns that translating only the menu and footer, with the main text left in one language, can make for a bad experience when the same page turns up in search results under several languages.
• Add hreflang tags. These are short lines in the page’s code that tell Google “this page also exists in Arabic, at this address.” Each version must list itself and every other version. The codes are standard ones, such as ar for Arabic or ar-AE for Arabic in the UAE, and a version marked x-default catches everyone else.
• Let people choose. Put a visible link to the other languages on every page, and don’t redirect visitors by a guess about their language. Google warns that such redirects can stop people and search engines from seeing every version.

Google works out a page’s language by reading it. The tags only connect versions it already understands.

What changes when a page reads right to left?

Arabic and Urdu run right to left, so the page becomes a mirror image of the English one: the menu, the text and the form fields all start from the right.

The W3C, the body that sets web standards, says to mark the whole page as right to left in its code, and that a well-written style sheet will then mirror the layout on its own (W3C Internationalization, Structural markup and right-to-left text in HTML). A site with “left” and “right” written into its styles won’t mirror cleanly, and needs fixing by hand.

In our work, these go wrong most often, and you can check them on your phone:

• Arrows that mean “next” still point right, when in Arabic they should point left.
• Phone numbers, prices and English brand names inside an Arabic sentence jump to the wrong end of the line.
• The Arabic text falls back to a default font that doesn’t match the rest of your brand.

Which pages should you translate first?

Translate the pages a customer needs to decide, in this order:

1. Your home page and the one service page that brings you the most enquiries. If each service has its own page, translate them in order of revenue.

2. Everything around contact: form labels, error messages, the thank-you message, and a WhatsApp button that opens with a greeting already written in that language.

3. Prices, what’s included, delivery times and terms. A buyer reads these closely.

Older blog posts and news can wait.

Why does translation quality matter?

Google’s spam policies define scaled content abuse as many pages made mainly to rank, with “little to no value to users,” and name automated translating as one way such pages get made (Google Search Central, Spam policies for Google web search, 28 Aug 2026). Google’s example is about copied content. Its test, whether the page helps the reader, applies to any page, and we wouldn’t publish a raw machine translation of a whole site and hope it passes.

Customers judge faster. In our experience, a native reader spots a stiff, word-for-word sentence at once, and reads it as a business that didn’t take them seriously.

Here’s what we do. A native speaker translates, a second person who knows your trade checks the terms, and someone on your team reads the key pages aloud before launch. Keep a short list of words that never change, such as product names, and update every language in the same week as the English.