Running an account in Arabic and English is usually described as translation work. Translation is the smallest part of it, and treating it as the whole job is why so many bilingual accounts feel like one real account and one echo. The parts that actually break are direction, register, and the calendar.
Direction is not a switch you flip. Arabic text runs right to left, but the moment a post mixes in anything that does not, the order stops being obvious. Numbers, Latin brand names, hashtags, URLs and prices all sit inside a right-to-left sentence as left-to-right islands, and the rules that decide where they land are genuinely counter-intuitive. A separator between two values is the classic trap: write a range or a pair with a slash or a middle dot between them and the two halves can appear swapped, depending on what characters sit either side. The same template renders correctly with one set of values and backwards with another, which is exactly the kind of bug that survives review.
The practical defence is to check the rendered post rather than the draft. Copy is almost always written in an editor that is quietly helping, and the platform will not help in the same way. If a line mixes Arabic with digits or a Latin word, look at it in the preview and read it aloud in the order it appears on screen. When something can be written without a neutral separator between two values, write it that way.
Register is the decision most bilingual accounts never actually make. Modern Standard Arabic reads as correct and slightly formal everywhere and belongs to nobody in particular. Gulf, Egyptian and Levantine dialects read as a person talking, and each is a choice to sound closer to one audience than another. Neither is wrong. What does not work is drifting between them post to post, which reads the way switching between formal and casual English mid-thread would.
The working week is not the same week. A Gulf audience is on a Friday and Saturday weekend. Much of North Africa and the Levant is not. Add ordinary business hours across the time zones and a single posting schedule cannot be optimal for both, which means the honest choice is to decide who each account is really for and schedule for them, rather than splitting the difference and being slightly wrong for everyone.
That is also why mirroring the schedule rarely works. The temptation is to publish the same thing in both languages at the same moment, which is tidy for the person scheduling and wrong for at least one audience. The two languages usually want different times, and often different frequencies, because the audiences are awake, working and scrolling at different hours.
None of this needs a bigger team. It needs the decisions made once and written down: which language leads, what register each account speaks in, whose week the calendar is built around, and what gets checked before a post with mixed text goes out. Once those four are settled, the bilingual account stops being twice the work and starts being two accounts that each know what they are.