2026-10-14 · 2 min read · By the Kluvan team
Running a team that speaks four languages
In the Gulf, a ten-person company can easily work in Arabic, English, Urdu and Malayalam. How to choose software that works for everyone on the team.
In Dubai, Riyadh or Doha, a ten-person company can work in four languages before lunch. The owner thinks in Arabic, the accountant in English, the technicians in Urdu or Malayalam, the customers in all of them.
Most business software was designed for one language and translated later. It shows: buttons that overflow, right-to-left pages that look broken, and staff who quietly go back to chat groups and paper because the system is hard to read.
Let each person choose their language
The language of the interface should be a personal setting, not a company setting. The technician reading a job in Urdu and the accountant closing the month in English should be able to work on the same records at the same time.
Keep documents in the customer's language
What your customers receive — quotes, invoices, statements — should follow the customer, not the person who created the document. Many businesses in the region need documents in both Arabic and English.
Right to left has to be designed in
Arabic and Urdu read from right to left. That affects everything: the order of columns, where the menu sits, the direction of arrows. If right to left was an afterthought, people notice on the first screen.
Numbers should stay easy to read
Mixing scripts inside amounts and phone numbers causes mistakes. Keeping digits in one consistent form across languages makes figures easy to check.
How Kluvan does it
Each person in Kluvan chooses their own interface language: English, Arabic, Urdu, Hindi, Bengali, Malayalam, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Turkish or Indonesian. Arabic and Urdu pages are laid out right to left from the start. Documents go out in English or Arabic, and digits stay in the same Latin form in every language. The country pack — the UAE or Egypt today — sets the currency, VAT, public holidays and the work week.
Our Bengali and Malayalam texts are waiting for a native review, and we are adding more languages. And when you need help, you can write to us on WhatsApp in your language.
