Arabic logos « Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog

Arabic logos

John Martz | January 22nd, 2009

Via The Ministry of Type comes two Flickr sets devoted to showing the different between the original English and the resulting translation into Arabic of several retail identities and examples of consumer packaging.

I was struck by the playful and clever ways in which the originals were faithfully adapted to meet the restrictions of the Arabic letterforms.

Sarah Badr

The features on the Graphicology Blog are great. The result of transliteration often does sound funny, especially as some English letters don't exist in Arabic. Some have to be made up or combined as replacements, e.g. 'p' is 'b', 'v' is an 'f' with three dots, and 'z' is a 'ts'. 'Beetza Ht' is a classic example: http://www.pizzahutsaudia.com -- though having said that, I've had a client before who opted out on the phonetic equivalent and went for connotative translation instead.

chris.m

The best part about this is the that the logo and slogan, in Arabic, are just phonetic equivalents. The Arabic would be pronounced "Ta-eed, Sew-bar Bluss".

That they would do that with the Brand name isn't unusual, but the seeing the slogan in Arabic like that is hilarious.