How to make a bilingual Arabic–English presentation that reads right in both directions

Disclosure: NOXI publishes this guide and is one of the tools it mentions; the method works in any presentation software.

Flipping the layout is the easy part. Bilingual decks go wrong in the details: a full stop that jumps to the wrong end of a line, a term translated two ways, a timeline that runs backwards for one audience, two versions that quote different numbers. This guide covers each of them, with a mirroring table, typography settings, glossary and fact-sheet templates and a QA checklist for both directions. The worked example is real: a Grade 7 science lesson, "Mangroves of the UAE" (أشجار القرم في الإمارات), built as an English deck and an Arabic deck of 11 slides each.

Choose the bilingual format from who reads the slides

Choose the format by asking who will read the slides, and where. Two mirrored decks suit separate audiences and decks that are sent as files; one deck with both languages on each slide suits a single mixed room; one deck with a bilingual glossary suits a room that works in one language but needs key terms in both.

How to lay out a slide that carries both languages

Use format 2 sparingly: two languages on one slide double the reading load, so it suits a ceremony agenda, a title, a quotation or one headline number, not a lesson or a board paper. Give each language its own text box and never mix the two in one paragraph. Two layouts work. In a stacked layout the lead language sits on top at full size and the second language sits below it at about three-quarters of that size, each aligned to its own start edge. In a split layout Arabic takes the right half, aligned right, and English the left half, aligned left, with the shared photo, number or chart between them or across the slide. Interleaved lines (Arabic, English, Arabic, English) are the hardest pattern to read and to edit.

Agree with the host which language leads before you design anything. The lead language sets the grid; the second language follows the same hierarchy one size smaller.

How the mangrove lesson combined formats 1 and 3

The worked example uses two complete decks and builds format 3 into each. The English deck teaches the local Arabic name of the grey mangrove, قُرْم (qurm), and both vocabulary slides list every term in English and Arabic, with the second language in a quieter column. That combination suits a school that teaches the same lesson to an Arabic-medium class and an English-medium class. For choosing classroom tools, see our guide to AI presentation tools for teachers.

Decide how closely the two versions must match

Before anyone writes a slide, decide the parity level between the two languages: sentence parity (a faithful translation), fact parity (the same facts, numbers, names and sources, worded for each reader) or outcome parity (the same objectives or decision, with examples chosen per audience). For most bilingual decks, fact parity is the right default.

The mangrove decks sit mostly at fact parity. Slide order, the nine agenda steps and the three learning objectives match. Titles are transcreated, not translated: "Six Useful Words" becomes مفردات الدرس ("lesson vocabulary"), "Three Ways a Mangrove Beats Salt and Mud" becomes the question كيف تتغلب شجرة القرم على الملح؟ ("how does the mangrove overcome salt?"), and "Mangroves Store Carbon" becomes القرم بطل المناخ ("the mangrove, a climate hero"). Both "where they grow" slides lead with the same figure: about 176 km² of mangroves in Abu Dhabi Emirate, reported by the Environment Agency – Abu Dhabi (EAD) on 1 April 2024.

Two slides sit at outcome parity. The English carbon slide charts the tonnage EAD reported for natural and planted mangroves in Abu Dhabi; the Arabic carbon slide uses a global per-hectare comparison attributed to UNEP. The food-chain examples differ too: a mottled crab and the greater flamingo in English, a crab and the crab plover in Arabic. For two separate classes that works, because each slide teaches the same idea. If both classes sit the same test, align those slides on one source and one example first.

The fact sheet: one table that both versions quote

A fact sheet is a short table of every number, date, name and source the deck uses, with the approved wording in each language. Writers in both languages quote it, and nobody looks a number up a second time. Five rows for the mangrove lesson, checked against EAD's release of 1 April 2024:

Agree the rounding in the sheet too, and write each source line in its reader's form: "Source: EAD (2024)" in English, المصدر: هيئة البيئة - أبوظبي (2024) in Arabic, as the Arabic mangrove deck does. For checking where AI-drafted figures come from, see our guide to AI presentations with research and citations.

What mirrors and what stays in the Arabic version

Mirror every element whose position shows reading order or sequence, and keep every element whose form carries meaning. Apple's right-to-left design guidelines, written for app interfaces, draw the same line: flip controls that show progress and reverse images whose order is meaningful, but do not flip photographs, logos or universal marks such as the checkmark, and never reverse the digits within a number (Apple).

Process flows, timelines and food chains

Sequences are the clearest case for mirroring. The Arabic adaptation slide puts step 1 at the right with every arrow pointing left; the Arabic timeline starts with 2021 at the right edge; the Arabic food chain runs right to left and adds a small cue, تُقرأ من اليمين ("read from the right"), which costs nothing and settles any doubt. The English food chain runs top to bottom instead. A vertical sequence reads the same way in both languages, so it is the easiest diagram to keep identical across a pair and the safest choice when one slide must serve both directions.

Charts: one decision for the whole deck

Charts are a house decision, not an automatic flip. Mirroring a time axis follows Arabic reading order; keeping the chart left to right matches the source tables readers may check it against. Either is defensible; mixing both in one deck is not. A sound default for a bilingual pair is to keep charts left to right in both versions, so the twins can be checked bar by bar, and to mirror everything around the chart: title, explanation, legend and source line. The Arabic mangrove deck does exactly this, with the value axis still at the left. If you do mirror, reverse the category axis with Format Axis and "Categories in reverse order" in PowerPoint or Excel (Microsoft), then check which side the value axis lands on. For axis labels, units and currencies in Arabic charts, see our Arabic-language guide to numbers and currencies in Arabic charts.

Photos, logos and icons

Never flip a photograph: a mirrored photo reverses any writing in it, and Apple notes that flipping a copyrighted image could be a violation. If a person in the English layout looks toward the text, they will look away from it once the layout mirrors, so choose another photo. Logos keep their original form; if your organisation has an official Arabic or bilingual version, use that file and never mirror one yourself. Flip only icons that show direction or movement, such as back, next, send or a progress bar; clocks, magnifiers, checkmarks and maps stay as they are.

Arabic typography on slides: typeface, size, spacing and emphasis

Set Arabic in a typeface that pairs with your Latin face, about 2 points larger when it sits beside Latin capitals, with more line spacing than English, no letter-spacing and no italics. Then embed the fonts, so the file opens the same way on the presenting computer.

The spacing values are starting points; the reasons behind them are not. W3C's Arabic and Persian layout requirements note that Arabic ascenders and descenders extend much further than Latin ones (W3C alreq), so English line spacing makes Arabic lines collide. The CSS Text specification treats Arabic as a cursive script that admits no gaps between its letters and advises authors to avoid letter-spacing on cursive scripts (W3C CSS Text Module Level 3); slide software may let you track Arabic anyway, but the result looks broken to an Arabic reader.

Pair the typefaces before you design either deck. IBM Plex, whose Sans family supports Arabic, and Google's Noto family both cover the two scripts under the SIL Open Font License. If your brand face has no Arabic companion, pick one with similar stroke contrast and visual size and fix the size ratio once in the template. Where a word in one script sits inside a line of the other, as قُرْم does in the English mangrove deck, set the Arabic one step larger. Our guide to making a presentation look professional covers the general type rules for both decks.

Finally, embed the fonts. In PowerPoint, go to File, Options, Save and tick "Embed fonts in the file", choosing "Embed all characters" if colleagues will edit the deck, because embedding only the characters used limits editing; some fonts' permissions do not allow embedding at all (Microsoft). Then open the file on the presenting computer, because a substituted Arabic font can change line breaks on every slide.

Mixed Arabic and English in one line: set the base direction

Every paragraph has a base direction, and it decides where brackets, full stops and words from the other script end up. Set the direction of each text box yourself, right to left for Arabic paragraphs and left to right for English ones, instead of letting the software guess, and then read every line that mixes the two scripts.

Software orders mixed text with the Unicode Bidirectional Algorithm: Arabic letters run right to left, Latin letters and the digits of a number left to right, and spaces, brackets and punctuation have no direction of their own. A neutral character between two letters of the same direction takes that direction; one between opposite directions takes the paragraph's base direction (W3C). That is why a wrong base direction sends a full stop to the other end of the line and swaps whole phrases.

The automatic guess is where most errors start. Microsoft describes the context rules that many right-to-left-aware programs apply: if the first strong character in a box is left-to-right, the reading order is left-to-right; if it is right-to-left, the reading order is right-to-left (Microsoft). Wherever a program, a web tool or an AI generator decides direction this way, an English caption that opens with an Arabic word, or an Arabic sentence that opens with a Latin name, takes the wrong direction.

Five habits prevent nearly all mixed-direction errors:

Mark the language as well as the direction. WCAG success criterion 3.1.2, Language of Parts (Level AA), asks that the language of each passage or phrase can be programmatically determined, so that screen readers can switch to the right pronunciation rules (W3C WAI). In PowerPoint, set the language of Arabic text to Arabic so proofing works in both languages, and check that exported PDFs and web versions keep that marking. Our accessibility review checklist covers the other checks.

Numerals, dates and units: make a house decision

Arabic text can use Western digits (0–9) or Arabic-Indic digits (٠–٩), and the choice varies by country and even within one country. Choose one set for the whole bilingual set, write it into your style guide with the actual characters, and keep the digits of every number in the same order in both directions.

The regional picture is mixed. W3C lists Arabic-Indic digits for eastern Arabic-speaking countries such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Iraq, and Western digits for western ones such as Algeria and Morocco (W3C alreq); Apple adds that usage varies even among areas within one country. Unicode's CLDR locale data, which much software relies on for default formatting, makes Western digits the default for Arabic in the UAE and Arabic-Indic digits the default for Arabic in Saudi Arabia (version 48, Unicode CLDR). The names mislead too: in English "Arabic numerals" usually means 0–9, Office calls 0–9 "Arabic" and ٠–٩ "Hindi", and Arabic speakers often call ٠–٩ الأرقام الهندية (Hindi numerals). Write the characters themselves into the style guide.

Office's numeral option for Arabic documents has four settings: Arabic, Hindi, Context (the shape depends on the surrounding text) and System (the shape is set by the computer's settings) (Microsoft). Because these settings change how digits are drawn, the same file can look different on another computer; if ٠–٩ must appear everywhere, check the exported PDF and the presenting laptop, or type the Arabic-Indic characters themselves. The month-name row comes from the same CLDR data (Unicode CLDR, Arabic (Jordan) calendar data).

Build the bilingual glossary before the slides

A bilingual glossary fixes one approved equivalent for every key term, name and abbreviation before writing starts. It is the most effective single control in a bilingual set, because terminology drift between two versions is invisible to reviewers who read only one language.

The two mangrove decks show why the table matters. Their vocabulary slides list the same six terms, yet the English deck gives "habitat" as موئل while the Arabic deck uses الموطن, and the English labels read "Tide" and "Salt gland" in one deck and "Tides" and "Salt glands" in the other. None of these is wrong, but a student who compares the two versions will notice, and one glossary row settles each case.

Take terms from the source your audience already uses: the curriculum textbook, the regulator's own Arabic name, the client's official name. Record one English spelling for each place and organisation name (Khor Kalba, Ras Al Khor), and send the glossary to anyone who translates, reviews or interprets the deck.

Worked example: the mangrove lesson, slide by slide

The English and Arabic mangrove decks follow the same 11-slide lesson and lay it out for each reader. The table records what changed for the Arabic reader on each slide, including the places where the two versions differ.

Three lessons come out of the pair. Mirroring was applied to order, not content: every sequence mirrors, while photographs, numbers, the species name and the chart axis do not. Each deck carries the other language where it helps learning. And parity is the weak point of any pair built as two decks: the carbon evidence, several examples and one glossary term differ, which is acceptable for separate classes and the first thing to align before a shared test. Both decks use Western digits throughout (176, 2021, 100 مليون, 10 دقائق), the default CLDR sets for Arabic in the UAE.

The two-direction QA checklist

Check a bilingual set three times: each deck alone, in its own direction; both decks side by side, against the fact sheet and the glossary; and the exported files on the computer that will present them. The checklist covers the errors that survive a review in one language.

Presenting to a mixed Arabic and English room

In a room where both languages are spoken, decide in advance which language leads, how the second language is served (on the slides, by an interpreter, with subtitles or in a handout) and how long each part will take, because bilingual delivery takes longer than either language alone.

Microsoft lists Arabic as a preview language for spoken input, with somewhat lower accuracy than fully supported languages, and as a language subtitles can be shown in (Microsoft); treat machine subtitles as support, not as a substitute for an interpreter at a formal event. If you alternate languages on stage, plan close to double the speaking time for those parts and cut slides rather than speaking faster; our slides-per-minute table helps with the arithmetic. Repeat each question from the floor in the other language before you answer it.

3 AI prompts for a bilingual Arabic–English deck

With AI, generate both versions from the same outline, fact sheet and glossary instead of machine-translating the finished slides: a translated deck inherits English layout decisions and sentence lengths, while a deck generated from a shared outline is laid out for its own direction from the start. Then run the QA checklist, because drafts in either language can add a number, swap a glossary term for a synonym or open a sentence with a word in the other script. Use these prompts in NOXI after attaching your outline, fact sheet and glossary, or in any AI tool that has them. Replace the brackets.

How to build a bilingual Arabic–English deck in NOXI

NOXI builds each language version from your outline and sets Arabic slides right to left. It is free, with no card and no watermark; uploading files needs a free account, and a full deck uses about 25 of the 1,000 monthly credits.

Frequently asked questions

How do you make a bilingual Arabic–English presentation?

Choose a format first: two mirrored decks, one deck with both languages per slide, or one deck with a bilingual glossary. Write one outline, one fact sheet and one glossary that both versions use. Lay out the Arabic version right to left, mirroring sequences but not photos, logos or numbers, then check both decks side by side.

Should Arabic and English be on the same slide?

Only when the slide is sparse and the audience is one mixed room, such as a ceremony, a government event or a keynote. Put each language in its own text box, either stacked with the lead language on top or split with Arabic on the right and English on the left. For lessons, reports and decks sent as files, make two separate decks instead.

What should be mirrored in an Arabic presentation?

Mirror everything whose position shows reading order: the slide grid, text alignment, process arrows, timelines, numbered lists, table column order, footers and page numbers. Do not mirror photographs, logos, checkmarks, clocks or the digits inside a number. Flip icons only when they show direction or movement, such as back and next arrows or a progress bar.

Should charts be mirrored for Arabic slides?

Treat it as a house decision for the whole deck. Mirroring a time axis follows Arabic reading order; keeping charts left to right matches the source data and lets twin charts be checked bar by bar. In a bilingual pair, a sound default is to keep the chart and mirror its title, legend and source line. Never mix both conventions in one deck.

Should Arabic slides use 0–9 or ٠–٩?

Either is correct; the choice depends on country and organisation. W3C lists Arabic-Indic digits (٠–٩) for countries such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Iraq, and Unicode's CLDR data defaults to Western digits (0–9) for Arabic in the UAE and to ٠–٩ for Saudi Arabia. Choose one set for the whole bilingual set and write the actual characters into your style guide.

What font size should Arabic text be next to English?

Start about 2 points larger than the neighbouring English when the English uses capitals, then judge by eye from the back of the room. Arabic has no uppercase, so at the same point size it can look smaller. Give Arabic more line spacing than English and never add letter-spacing to it.

Why do Arabic and English get jumbled in PowerPoint?

The paragraph direction is wrong for the text. Many programs set direction from the first strong character, so an English line starting with an Arabic word becomes right to left, and brackets and full stops move. Set each text box's direction with the Right-to-left or Left-to-right paragraph button, avoid starting a line with a word in the other script, and put glosses in separate labels.

How do I translate a presentation into Arabic without breaking the layout?

Build the Arabic version from the same outline, fact sheet and glossary rather than translating the finished slides line by line. Rewrite titles as natural Arabic, mirror every sequence, keep photos and logos unflipped, and choose digits once. Then have a fluent Arabic reader review the deck aloud and open the exported file on the presenting computer.

Sources & methodology

How this guide was made: it applies the cited layout, typography and accessibility guidance to slide design; the three formats, parity levels, line-spacing starting points, checklists and templates are editorial recommendations, not standards. The worked example uses the two real decks described above, as generated; the mangrove figures were checked against EAD's release. All sources were checked on 9 October 2026.

• [1] What to flip and not flip in right-to-left layouts; numeral systems; balancing Arabic size against Latin capitals; not flipping photographs, logos and universal marks — Apple, Human Interface Guidelines: Right to left (no date displayed).
• [2] Digit families and where they are used; number order in right-to-left text; separators and the percent sign; ascenders and descenders; kashida; vowel marks — W3C, Arabic & Persian Layout Requirements, Group Draft Note (2 October 2025).
• [3] Base direction and how neutral characters take their direction — W3C Internationalization, Richard Ishida, Unicode Bidirectional Algorithm basics (first published 24 April 2013; last substantive update 9 August 2016).
• [4] Arabic as a cursive script that admits no gaps for justification or letter-spacing; advice to avoid letter-spacing on cursive scripts — W3C, CSS Text Module Level 3, Candidate Recommendation Draft (14 August 2026).
• [5] Default numbering systems for Arabic (UAE) and Arabic (Saudi Arabia), and Arabic month names by locale — Unicode CLDR, cldr-json version 48 locale data: numbers (ar-AE, ar-SA) and Gregorian calendar data (ar-JO, ar-AE).
• [6] Office numeral options for Arabic documents: Arabic, Hindi, Context, System — Microsoft Learn, WdArabicNumeral enumeration (Word) (2017, updated 2024).
• [7] Right-to-left paragraph buttons and Office's first-strong-character context rules — Microsoft Support, Using right-to-left languages in Office (no date displayed).
• [8] Reversing the plotting order of chart categories — Microsoft Support, Change the plotting order of categories, values, or data series (no date displayed).
• [9] Embedding fonts in PowerPoint and the limits on embedding — Microsoft Support, Benefits of embedding custom fonts (no date displayed).
• [10] Live captions and subtitles in PowerPoint; Arabic as a preview spoken language and as a subtitle language — Microsoft Support, Present with real-time, automatic captions or subtitles in PowerPoint (no date displayed).
• [11] Language of Parts, Level AA, and why screen readers need the language of each passage — W3C WAI, Understanding Success Criterion 3.1.2: Language of Parts (updated 12 July 2026).
• [12] Abu Dhabi mangrove area (176 km², 17,600 hectares), carbon stored by natural and planted mangroves, and the national target of 100 million mangroves by 2030 — Environment Agency – Abu Dhabi, EAD plants 10 mangrove trees for each COP28 visitor (1 April 2024).
• [13] Type families covering Latin and Arabic under the SIL Open Font License — IBM, Plex typeface repository (README) and Noto fonts, Noto Arabic repository.

Build your next bilingual deck in NOXI, free: start from one outline, create the Arabic or English version with right-to-left slides, refine each slide in either language, and export editable PowerPoint files with the fonts embedded, Arabic included.