A Misunderstanding in One Word
He said: get me some B-roll for this scene.
So the other went out and came back with ten wide shots of the location: a general view of the street, the building, the sky.
What was needed was close shots of hands working, to cover the cuts in the interview.
A day was lost. Not because either of them was careless, but because one meant "shots of the place" and the other meant "covering shots", and the word was the same.
This happens constantly on Arabic-speaking teams, because most video production terms arrived transliterated from English, so a single term ends up with three names: the Latin name as pronounced, an Arabic equivalent, and whatever the team itself has started calling it.
This glossary gathers the recurring ones, so you can agree on one language with your team instead of discovering the mismatch after a shoot day.
Writing Terms
Hook (الخطّاف): the first 15 to 30 seconds that decide whether the viewer stays. How to write one is covered in: how to write a strong opening hook for an Arabic YouTube video.
Content card (بطاقة المحتوى): an independent unit of the script with a heading and body, movable and deletable without dismantling the rest.
Voiceover, VO (التعليق الصوتي): recorded speech heard without the speaker appearing on screen.
Piece to camera, PTC (الحديث إلى الكاميرا): appearing on screen addressing the viewer directly.
Call to action, CTA (الدعوة إلى إجراء): the sentence defining what you want the viewer to do after the video.
Narrative (السرد): the arrangement of events and ideas carrying the viewer from start to finish.
Filming Terms
Wide shot (اللقطة الواسعة): shows the whole location and establishes where we are.
Medium shot (اللقطة المتوسطة): follows the action and shows a person from the waist up.
Close-up (اللقطة القريبة): shows detail or emotion on the face.
B-roll (اللقطات التكميلية): footage played over voiceover to illustrate what's said or to cover cuts. This is the word that cost a shoot day at the top of this article, so agree on what it means on your team before you go out.
Coverage (التغطية): filming a single scene from more than one shot, so the edit has freedom to cut.
Ambient sound (الصوت المحيط): the sound of the location alone with no speech, recorded to fill audio gaps.
Shot list (قائمة اللقطات): a table translating script cards into what will actually be filmed, as in: from script to shot list: how to bridge writing and filming.
Publishing and Performance Terms
Thumbnail (الصورة المصغّرة): the image shown before someone clicks the video.
Click-through rate, CTR (نسبة الضغط): the proportion of people who clicked out of those the video was shown to.
Watch time (مدة المشاهدة): the total time viewers spent in the video, not the number of views.
Retention curve (منحنى الاستبقاء): a chart showing when viewers left, more important than view count for diagnosing a script.
Original content (المحتوى الأصلي): content filmed or produced by its creator, as opposed to reuploaded or minimally altered material. It has become a classification with a direct effect on distribution, as in: Facebook's original content rules and what they mean for how you write.
Tooling Terms
MCP: a protocol letting an AI assistant access a given app's data directly instead of copying and pasting.
Idea backlog (مخزون الأفكار): recorded ideas not yet produced, returned to instead of starting from zero.
Workflow (سير العمل): the sequence of stages from idea to publish.
A Note on Usage
Don't be rigid about translating every term. Some Latin names have settled into use among Arabic-speaking creators, and replacing them with an unfamiliar Arabic equivalent confuses your team more than it clarifies.
The practical criterion: use the Arabic equivalent where it's understood without explanation, and keep the Latin name where it's what people actually say.
And more important than any particular name is that your team agrees on one and sticks to it. The lost shoot day at the top of this article wasn't caused by someone using the wrong word, it was caused by nobody asking what it meant before they left.