English shares the provisions of law company capital members of the Board of Directors amounts | Most common/Eastern Arabic الأسهم أحكام القانون رأس مال الشركة أعضاء مجلس الإدارة المبالغ | This document/North Africa الحصص ترتيبات القانون رأس المال الاجتماعي مسيرون القيم |
Having seen this example that the written Arabic of North Africa has some divergences compared with that of the Middle East, we can also find a clear French/Spanish influence in using the term رأس المال الاجتماعي (ra's al-maal al-ijtimaa'i) as opposed to رأس مال الشركة (ra's maal al-sharika) for company capital. The difference in how much each is used isn't as drastic here; رأس المال الاجتماعي (ra's al-maal al-ijtimaa'i) has 78,500 hits, and رأس مال الشركة (ra's maal al-sharika) has 344,000. The thing to note here is that while the second literally means "the company's capital", the first actually means "social capital" but they don't mean it in the sociological value of social networks sense. Instead, it is a calque from French (and also Spanish) where société (Spanish: sociedad) means company and thus capital social means "company capital".
The last difference I will address is between مبالغ (mabaaligh) and قيم (qiyam) 'amounts of money'. The former normally means 'amount of money' and the latter means 'value', so other Arab writers might even use the two together and write things like دفع مبلغ قيمته (daf' mablagh qiimatuhu) 'payment of an amount with the value of [i.e. equaling]', and indeed Arabic writers have written that exact phrase 35,200 times on the internet. However, my text used قيم (qiyam) with the meaning of مبالغ (mabaaligh), and thus made quite rare constructions like قيمة تتم دفعها (qiima tatimm daf'uha) 'an amount to be paid' which is only on the web 196 times as opposed to the much more common مبلغ يتم دفعه (mablagh yatimm daf'uhu) which has been spotted in the wild 38,100 times.
These were just a few examples that got my interest, but the reality is that we as translators are faced with this kind of variation all day everyday. Paying attention to where exactly our text comes from helps, as does remembering that context is king.