Next.js in United Arab Emirates
Next.js development services for UAE companies
A Next.js development company working with UAE teams. Arabic is not a translation layer: right-to-left changes layout, icons and bidirectional text, and English-first codebases handle none of it.
The UAE is where the gap between "supports Arabic" and "works in Arabic" is widest, and it is usually a codebase problem rather than a translation problem.
Right-to-left is an architecture decision
Adding an Arabic locale to an English-first Next.js application is easy. Making it correct is not, and the difference is visible to any Arabic reader within seconds.
Physical CSS properties are the root cause. margin-left,
padding-right, text-align: left, border-left - every one of these is
wrong in RTL, and there are hundreds of them in a typical codebase. The fix
is logical properties: margin-inline-start, padding-inline-end,
text-align: start. They resolve against the document direction, so one
declaration is correct in both. Retrofitting them across an existing design
system is mechanical but large; starting with them costs nothing.
Directional icons have to mirror, and non-directional ones must not. A
"next" arrow points the other way in Arabic. A play button does not. A
clock does not. A search magnifier does not. There is no automatic rule
that gets this right, so it has to be a decision per icon - and a global
transform: scaleX(-1) on every SVG, which is what most teams reach for,
produces mirrored logos and backwards clocks.
Bidirectional text is its own category. An Arabic sentence containing a Latin product name or a number contains multiple direction runs, and the browser resolves them by an algorithm that produces correct output only if you have not fought it. We learned this the hard way building our own typography checker: it counted the client rectangles of each text node to find words broken across lines, and reported hundreds of failures in Arabic that did not exist - because a single line containing both directions produces several rectangles. Counting distinct vertical positions instead of rectangles gave the right answer.
That kind of bug is exactly what an English-speaking team ships without noticing, because it renders fine to someone who is not reading the text.
Numerals, dates and currency follow locale rules that differ from the direction rules, and mixing them up produces output that is technically valid and reads as wrong.
Two legal regimes in one country
The UAE has a federal personal data protection law, and the financial free zones - DIFC and ADGM - operate their own data protection regimes with their own regulators. Which one applies depends on where your entity sits, not on where your users are.
For a build this is less exotic than it sounds. It means the answer to "where can this data live and who can it be shared with" is not uniform across the country, so it has to be settled before you choose a hosting region rather than after. Free-zone entities in particular often have requirements closer to European rules than to the federal baseline.
There is also an AWS region in the UAE now, which removes the excuse that serving the Gulf means serving it from Europe. For an audience in Dubai the difference between a function in Frankfurt and one in the region is not subtle.
Typical work
UAE engagements skew towards customer-facing platforms that need to be genuinely bilingual - application development and Next.js commerce, with the direction model settled in the first week. Where an English site already exists and Arabic was added later, the honest starting point is an audit that says how much of the RTL work was done properly and how much is cosmetic.