[Cyph0n]

As an Arabic speaker, baby steps!

For spoken Arabic, a decent placeholder is either MSA (standard Arabic) or a generally understood dialect (Egyptian or Levantine).

The latter is what a lot of the recent Arabic game dubs have been doing (e.g., Ubisoft). Another example: Pixar and Disney use Egyptian Arabic for their dubs.

Edit: Oh, and for written Arabic, you should almost always be using MSA. That is, you shouldn’t worry about the dialect of your target audience.

[james-redwood]

I pity the poor dev who has a Moroccan co-worker that helpfully offers to translate their application into darija thinking it’s Arabic

[curiousgal]

Tangent: I hate how Moroccans monopolized the word darija to mean "Moroccan Arabic". Every country in North Africa calls their own language darija!

[poulpy123]

Do you know why levantine arabic is more used for dubbing ?

[Cyph0n]

My understanding is that it’s simply because they were among the first to setup dedicated dubbing studios.