Print-ready Arabic typesetting for a development-finance impact report

The agency, the institution and the publication are anonymised throughout.

Sector: Financial services

Language: English into Arabic

Service: DTP/Typesetting, Human Translation & Localisation, Verification

The Challenge

An international publishing and communications agency had designed and signed off the English edition of a multilateral development finance institution's annual allocation and impact report in InDesign. The institution's own translator supplied the Arabic text in Word, and the Arabic edition had to appear to the same design and print standard as the English, in a right-to-left layout, with charts, icon sets and photography rebuilt around Arabic copy. A fixed publication commitment left roughly three working days once the final English artwork was released. The supplied Arabic text also carried a section-numbering inconsistency that had to be resolved without altering the institution's approved content.

The Solution

Guildhawk took the approved English artwork and the client-supplied Arabic text and produced a publication-quality Arabic edition:

• Scoped and quoted on the day the enquiry arrived, with two options, a standard five working day turnaround and a three working day rush, so the agency could commit to its client's publication date before the artwork was final.
• Rebuilt the signed-off English InDesign artwork as a right-to-left Arabic edition: mirrored spreads, Arabic-capable fonts, re-flowed body copy and captions, and Arabic versions of the icon sets, logo lockups and text-bearing graphics placed in position.
• Treated the approved English layout as the reference where the supplied Arabic conflicted with it, so the duplicated section numbering was corrected in the layout and reported back to the agency.
• Commissioned an independent Arabic linguist to run a format check on the typeset file and to translate the few short segments missing from the supplied text, leaving no English placeholders in the Arabic edition.
• Ran an in-house quality check under APM-certified project management, then packaged the edition for production: high and low resolution print PDFs plus editable InDesign and IDML files with all fonts and over 70 linked graphic assets.
• Handled the pre-publication report inside Guildhawk's confidential, ISO 27001 certified delivery processes, with secure transfer of the artwork packages in both directions.

The Results

• The print-ready Arabic edition, running to just over 40 pages, was delivered by end of business on the agreed date, inside the three working day rush window.
• The Arabic edition matched the English design, so the institution published one report in two languages with consistent charts, iconography and pagination.
• The numbering inconsistency in the supplied Arabic text was resolved against the approved English layout, protecting the report's internal cross-references.
• Page-level amendments raised after first delivery were turned around under the same project, with no further order required.
• The agency received fully packaged, editable InDesign files, keeping future updates and reprints in its own hands.
• One accountable supplier covered Arabic typesetting, linguistic verification and quality assurance for the edition.

Why this matters for reporting and communications teams in development finance

Allocation and impact reporting is where a development institution's commitments to investors and member states become public, and those reports carry hard publication windows. The Arabic edition is often the one read by the institution's closest stakeholders, so it has to hold the same authority and design quality as the English. Splitting the work between a design agency, an in-house translator and a separate typesetter is where editions drift apart: text overflows, mirrored layouts break, data graphics lose their labels, and numbering stops matching. Guildhawk works to the approved artwork, verifies right-to-left layout with Arabic linguists, and hands back editable, packaged files with a clear record of what was changed and why. Reporting teams get a bilingual publication they can stand behind, reuse and update.

About Guildhawk

Guildhawk is a British language-intelligence company founded in 2001 and headquartered in London. It combines 3,000+ vetted, certified linguists across 200+ languages with proprietary AI built in its own UK Gai Labs, delivering every project with a defensible audit trail. Guildhawk is ISO 27001 certified, a Queen's Award winner and a 2025 Safety and Security Entrepreneur Awards (SSEAs) winner, and processes work inside a secure ISO 27001 confidentiality envelope. Its GAI Suite of proprietary AI tools provides secure, advanced agents for AI translation with 1-click human-in-the-loop, anomaly detection and data anonymisation. Clients include global law firms, life-sciences, energy, financial and government organisations. 

Talk to us about multilingual report production and right-to-left typesetting.