Road sign in Yorkshire does not have Arabic translations

A photo is circulating on social media supposedly showing a road sign in Yorkshire that has been translated into Arabic. But the image has been digitally altered and is not genuine. 

Several posts on both Facebook and X (formerly Twitter) have shared the image with text saying “Islamificatiin of U.K. [sic]” and one post has been shared more than 1,000 times. 

The image shows a green road sign directing drivers to Harrogate, Leeds, Shipley and Keighley, with a separate sign for an airport. Words in Arabic appear beneath the English. 

However, this photo has been edited to include the Arabic, and has been circulating online since at least 2016. 

The image appears to have been taken from a Google Street view image from 2015. The real sign, which is in Bradford, Yorkshire, does not have Arabic translations. The same white van can be seen in the background as in the altered image. 

The image reportedly came from a now-deleted blog post that claimed this was one of multiple signs installed at the request of Bradford’s Grand Mufti Mohammed Amin al Husseini at a cost of £100,000. (It seems from reporting at the time that the blog wrongly claimed the added language was Urdu rather than Arabic.) 

Google Street view images from March 2022 show a new version of the sign which does not have Arabic translations either. A new housing development has since been built and the road layout has changed.  

Another clue the photo is not genuine is that the Arabic text is not a translation of the English words. For example, the text under the word ‘Airport’ translates to “May God protect you” (translated using Google). 

While one post shares the altered image with the caption: “Not just London”, suggesting Arabic road traffic signs can be found in the capital, Full Fact has found no reports of road signs anywhere in the UK being translated into Arabic. 

Most road traffic signs in the UK are exclusively in English with the exception of those featuring Welsh in Wales and some with Gaelic in Scotland. 

In 2019, Highways England introduced electronic message boards on the M6 that displayed information about temporary roadworks in nine European languages. This used automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) to identify approaching foreign vehicles. 

Full Fact has seen other examples of images of road signs being digitally altered to imply a certain message, including one image supposedly showing a road sign dividing Oxford into ‘districts’ and another one suggesting a road sign in Ukraine told Russian troops to “go f*** yourselves”. 

Image courtesy of Christine Johnstone