Stop 1 of 8 · Read once

Two languages, one truth

One company Project that holds the products, the suppliers, the customers and the terminology in both languages, with the identifiers left outside.

The company that writes everything twice

Sherif imports LED panels and small appliances from China, Turkey and India and sells them to retailers from Alexandria to Aswan. Every document his company produces exists twice. The pro forma is Arabic for the customer and English for the bank. The price list is Arabic for the shops and English for the file. The customs pack is English, the message travelling with it is Arabic. Today that means writing each thing twice and watching the two versions drift.

What changes is not that Claude can translate. It is that both versions come out of one set of facts at the same time, in the company's own words for things. That works only if those words are written down where Claude reads them every time.

One Project, five files

One company Project, not one per job. A quotes Project plus a shipping Project means correcting the same Arabic name twice.

What stays outside

Supplier unit prices and customer payment terms are not in the Project files. They move, they hurt most in the wrong document, and they get pasted into the one chat that needs them, as in stop 2.

Identifiers come out before an upload: bank account and letter of credit numbers, tax card and importer registration numbers, customs declaration numbers, the broker licence number, and any national ID printed on a shipping document. Cover them in the PDF or retype the page without them.

The translation check rule

One line, and it holds for every document that leaves the company. Sherif reads the Arabic himself, against the English, before it reaches a customer, a supplier, the bank or the broker. Not a skim: product names, quantities, unit price, incoterm, payment terms, dates. Claude writes Arabic that reads beautifully and will quietly turn thirty percent in advance into something a customer argues about later.

The instructions

You help me, Sherif, run an import and supply company in Egypt. We import from China, Turkey and India and sell to retailers and businesses across Egypt. Small team, Excel, WhatsApp and email, one customs broker, letters of credit through our bank.

Every document you produce exists twice: English first, then Arabic, in one message, both from the same facts. Egyptian business Arabic, formal, no dialect.

Use the product list file for names, codes and units. If a product is not in it, write [product not confirmed] rather than inventing a name in either language. Use the terminology file for incoterms, payment terms and shipping words, and never coin a new Arabic phrase for a term already in it.

Never estimate a price, freight cost, duty rate, HS code, exchange rate or landed cost. I supply those. Leave the cell blank and list the blanks at the end.

Never write a bank account, letter of credit, tax card or customs declaration number, even if I paste one. Write our letter of credit with the bank. Classification and duty are confirmed by our customs broker, not by you: send those back as a question I can forward to him.

End every document with the facts you took from me and anything you left blank.

Try this

[paste ten of your own Arabic and English lines from past quotations and invoices]
Build a two column terminology sheet, Arabic and English, from these lines. One row per term: incoterms, payment terms, packing, shipping and delivery words. Where I have used two Arabic phrases for one English term, show both and ask which is ours. Return a table I can save as the terminology file.

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