Mersal Writing to Clients in Their Language
One matter, three registers
Across much of the world, a single file carries more than one language. Arabic runs right to left. French holds a formal legal register with its own conventions of address. English drafts the commercial spine of the deal. Suppose a matter opens with an Arabic-speaking founder, a French holding company and a share agreement drafted in English. That is one file, three registers, and one firm answerable for every word.
Each language demands different things. Arabic requires true right-to-left typesetting, not Latin text nudged to the right margin. French legal drafting has a register a client will recognize instantly, and notice when it is missing. English commercial drafting carries its own precision. A translation that reads as a translation tells the client the firm did not take the matter seriously in their language.
Layout is meaning, not decoration
Right-to-left is not a cosmetic mirror. Numerals, punctuation, tables and signature blocks each follow their own rules. A column order that is correct in one direction is wrong in the other. An invoice whose totals sit on the wrong side, or whose serial reads left to right inside a right-to-left page, looks provisional. The client does not parse the typography. They simply sense that something is off, and that sense attaches to the advice.
The discipline is to compose in each language as a native document, not to retrofit one layout for all three. Mersal typesets native English, Arabic and French with true right-to-left layout and correct legal terminology, and issues documents and the client portal in the client's own language.
The client reads in one language only
Internally a firm may work in several languages at once. The client usually receives in one. The filing, the case status, the invoice and the sealed receipt should all reach that client in the language they chose, with no seam where a system reverted to a default. Consistency across every touchpoint is what reads as competence.
Consider the Acknowledge Receipt button on an invoice. If the document is Arabic but the button is English, the client meets a small foreign object at the exact moment you are asking them to confirm a debt. Small seams accumulate into an impression. In a portal that presents each client's filings, statements and receipts in their own language, that seam does not appear.
Multilingual practice is not a specialty offered by a few firms. In much of the world it is the baseline condition of practice, and clients judge a firm by whether it meets that condition without visible effort. Language quality is not presentation laid over the real work. It is the work, read by the only person whose reading counts. A document that speaks to the client in their own tongue, correctly set, says the firm was listening before it began.
Matters, conflicts, VAT billing, sealed receipts and the docket, in one defensible system.