Five years ago, a junior lawyer in Doha or Riyadh could specialise in one language and rely on translators for the other. That window is closing. Cross-border deals, mixed-language tribunals, and regulators that publish in both Arabic and English have made bilingual fluency a baseline rather than a differentiator.
Translation vs drafting
A translated contract is a derivative document. A bilingually drafted contract is a single document with two authentic texts — each written to capture the legal effect intended, not just the words of the other version. The difference shows up when the two versions diverge and a tribunal must decide which one governs.
Most GCC commercial contracts specify Arabic as the governing language if there is ambiguity, even where English is the operational version. A lawyer who only drafts in English and trusts translation is delegating the legal effect of their work to someone whose review the client likely cannot evaluate.
What it looks like in practice
Bilingual drafting means writing the Arabic provision first when the governing language is Arabic; choosing English terms whose Arabic equivalents are well-settled in regional case law; flagging civil-code concepts that have no direct English analogue; and ensuring defined terms map cleanly across both versions.
This is craft, not translation. It is learnable, but rarely taught in law school.