Guide

Translating Documents into Japanese, Korean & Arabic: What Most Tools Get Wrong

Updated June 2026 · 6 min read

English-to-English-like languages are the easy case. The moment you translate into Japanese, Korean, or Arabic, document translators start to fall apart — fonts go missing, line breaks land in odd places, and Arabic text faces the wrong way. If you're expanding into high-value markets in Asia and the Middle East, here's what to watch for and how to get a clean result.

1. Fonts: the silent failure

The most common problem isn't the translation — it's the font. If your document uses a font that doesn't include Japanese (CJK), Korean (Hangul), or Arabic glyphs, the translated characters show up as empty boxes (the dreaded "tofu"). The text is correct; the document just can't draw it.

The fix: use a font that covers the target script. The Noto family (Noto Sans JP, Noto Sans KR, Noto Naskh Arabic) is free and designed exactly for this. Set it before or after translating, and the boxes disappear.

2. Arabic and right-to-left layout

Arabic reads right to left, which flips more than the text: alignment, bullet points, table column order, and even where punctuation sits. A translator that only swaps words leaves you with Arabic text trapped in a left-to-right layout that feels wrong to native readers.

After translating into Arabic, check that paragraphs are right-aligned and lists flow from the right. Good tools detect RTL languages and handle direction for you — including the interface itself.

3. Japanese and Korean line breaking

Japanese and Korean don't use spaces between words the way English does, so line breaking follows different rules. Text that looked fine in English can break mid-word or leave awkward gaps. Keep your text in real text boxes (not images) so the layout engine can break lines correctly for each language.

4. Keep the structure, change the language

All three languages expand or contract differently from English. The reliable approach for any document — Word, PowerPoint, Excel — is to translate the text in place, leaving tables, headers, and images untouched, so the file rebuilds itself in the new language. That's how Translyo works, and it automatically handles right-to-left layout for Arabic.

5. Localize, don't just translate

These markets reward attention to detail. A few things that signal quality:

• Numbers, dates, and currency. Format them for the local convention, not a direct copy of the source.
• Honorifics and tone. Japanese and Korean have levels of politeness; the right register matters for business documents.
• Names and brands. Decide once how to render them and keep it consistent across every file.

6. Always have a native speaker check high-stakes files

Machine translation gets you 90% of the way fast and cheaply. For contracts, marketing, and anything customer-facing in these markets, a short review by a native speaker is the difference between "understandable" and "professional."

The bottom line

Japanese, Korean, and Arabic aren't harder to translate — they're harder to lay out. Use a tool that keeps your document's structure and handles fonts and direction, then do a quick native-speaker pass for anything important. Upload your file, choose the language, and get back a document that looks like it was made for that market.