Languages and writing systems are one of my hobbies, so I enjoy working on internationalization projects.
Although I had no prior knowledge of Arabic, I already knew a bit about best practices for typesetting right-to-left and multidirectional languages. I supplemented this with a bit of research on current best practices, and a few weeks of Arabic Duolingo to get a basic feel for the language.
The most significant piece of work in the project turned out to be typographical. Our devs had had some difficulty accessing web fonts for PDF rendering through our exterior firewall. Instead of using the prescribed Arabic font, which had a nice sans serif profile very similar to our Latin font, they’d resorted to letting the browser default to a hard-to-read serif.
The ensuing challenge turned out to involve negotiation and bureaucracy. Through a combination of persistence and patience, I was eventually able to get our external security rules changed so that PDFs of our Certificates of Achievement could be rendered using the intended typography.