Our Story

Long before Al Wissam had a name, it had a person.

Elias Hamati was born in 1932, in Palestine, a boy who discovered early that words could hold a whole world inside them. Long before there were classrooms built for it, he built one for himself: hours spent reading, teaching English to anyone willing to sit and listen, and coming to understand language not as a set of rules, but as an art.

The belief that language deserved care, precision, and respect followed him through every chapter that came after. He carried it into the translation field, where he spent years mastering his craft: the sober discipline that legal and official documents demand, and the quiet human weight that a single translated sentence can carry for someone's entire life.

Then, on 24 June 1998, on Hamdan Street, in the beating heart of Abu Dhabi, he did what few people are ever brave enough to do: he started again, alone. He issued the trade name himself: Al Wissam. Not just a licence to open a small office, but a mark he intended to leave on Abu Dhabi's market. No team yet. No reputation yet. Just a desk, a language, and a promise he made to himself: that every document to pass through his hands would be treated as if it mattered. Because to someone, it always did.

Slowly, that one desk became an office. That office earned a name. That name earned a reputation, one document, one client, one carefully chosen word at a time.

Today, Al Wissam Legal Translation carries his name forward, not only as a founding date on a certificate, but as the same quiet promise he started with: that every word we translate is a word someone has trusted us with.

That is where Al Wissam began. Not with a company. With a man who believed that words, translated with care, could change the course of someone's life.