Why literal translation fails between these languages
Arabic and English build sentences differently. Arabic favours coordination, longer clauses and repetition for emphasis. English favours subordination, shorter sentences and variety. A faithful word-for-word rendering produces English that feels breathless and repetitive, or Arabic that feels clipped and abrupt.
Register is the bigger problem. Arabic has a well-developed formal register used in business, official and religious contexts, and English has no direct equivalent. Translating formal Arabic literally into English produces something that reads as oddly stiff, while translating casual English literally into Arabic can read as disrespectful.
Idiom is the third gap. Religious expressions, blessing formulas and politeness conventions appear constantly in Arabic and have no literal English counterpart. They have to be adapted to an equivalent function rather than translated word for word.
Modern Standard Arabic versus the dialects
Modern Standard Arabic is the written standard, understood across the region and used for documents, journalism, official correspondence and anything formal. If you are translating a contract, a policy, a product page or a professional email, use MSA.
The dialects are spoken varieties and they differ substantially from each other and from MSA. Gulf, Levantine and Egyptian are the three largest, and a marketing caption written in Egyptian will feel natural to Egyptians and slightly foreign to Gulf readers.
The practical rule is that MSA is never wrong but is sometimes stiff, while a dialect is warmer but narrower. For social content aimed at one market, a dialect outperforms MSA. For anything read outside a single country, use MSA.
Right-to-left specifics that get missed
Arabic is written right to left, but numbers, Latin brand names and acronyms run left to right inside the Arabic text. Mixed-direction strings are the most common source of broken formatting in translated documents, and they need checking after you paste the output.
Punctuation differs too. Arabic uses its own comma and question mark characters, and quotation marks follow different conventions. The tool outputs proper Arabic punctuation rather than substituting Latin characters.
How to verify a translation you cannot read
Every result includes a back translation: the tool translates its own output back into the original language so you can compare. If the meaning survived the round trip, the translation is likely sound. If something drifted, you can see exactly where.
The notes section names the specific decisions made, including terms with no direct equivalent and idioms that had to be adapted. Read it before using the translation on anything important, because it is where the judgement calls are disclosed.
For anything legally binding, use a certified human translator. Machine translation is reliable for comprehension, correspondence and content, and not reliable enough for contracts.