The Guide to Translation and Localization: Localizing Bidirectional Languages
By Lingo Systems,
Portland, OR, U.S.A.
info [at] lingosys . com
www.lingosys.com
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[ Table of
Contents ]
Chapter 13: Localizing Bidirectional
Languages
Background
One of the challenges when translating into certain languages
is that the writing direction of the target language may
be different from that of the source language. Middle Eastern
languages like Arabic and Hebrew are written right to left,
while Latin languages like English and Romanian are written
left to right. When a predominandy right-to-left language
contains left-to-right writing (and most do), the result
is a bidirectional document. Examples of bidirectional languages
include Arabic, Hebrew, Yiddish, Farsi, Urdu, Azerbaijani,
Punjabi, Pushto, Dari, and Uigur.
|
Oussama
Abou-Jamous
Localization
Engineer
If you think you can write, try writing
in reverse order from right to left. The writing direction
of the Arabic script, my native language, is right-to-left,
so learning English was not easy at all. It was like
forcing your brain to think backward to write a useful
sentence. |
Challenges
Most applications and websites are designed for languages
that are written from left to right. As such, applying the
left-to-right settings contained in one of these applications
to a bidirectional language often creates some interesting
challenges. Fortunately, there are ways to resolve many
of them.
User Interface Layout
The direction of writing affects the way information
should be presented and placed. For example, some applications
use icons to tell users to go to the "Next" or
"Previous" page. Because these icons do not have
the same meaning when used with a bidirectional language,
however, users often become confused (Figure 1).
In Figure 1, the "Next" icon for the left-to-right
language is correcdy understood by the application. For
the bidirectional language, however, the "Next"
icon is interpreted as "Previous." To fix this
problem, the images need to be flipped horizontally (i.e.,
the one on the right is moved to the left and vice versa)
and the underlying functionality must be changed as well
(Figure 2).
Bidirectional languages can also be confusing to users.
When providing step-by-step instructions, you will need
to modify the layout for reading from right to left to ensure
that the steps are followed in the proper order. Notice
in "Figure 3" how the following steps will be
interpreted differently by users with different reading
orientations:
These steps can be easily completed if you read them from
left to right, but if you translate them into a bidirectional
language and leave them in the same order, the steps will
be read from left to right and misinterpreted. The first
thing the user will do is to look for the application's
"Shortcut to start" without installing the application
or even inserting the CD in the CD-ROM drive. Obviously,
it is critical to modify the layout of the interface when
localizing into a bidirectional language.
Combing Text from Languages with Opposite Writing
Directions
When localizing into a bidirectional language, some information,
like brand names, does not get translated. A bidirectional
document that has text with different writing directions
forces the right-to-left text to be stored in reverse order
around the left-to-right text. This makes the sentence meaningless
and unreadable in most cases. "Figure 4" contains
a sentence that has a mix of Arabic and English words. Notice
how the order of the words is misplaced in the text file
and needs to be re-ordered to display correctly.
In most text editors, you can choose the reading order
to be right-to-left or left-to-right but this does not fix
the issue entirely. It will only fix the reading order in
that editor, but once the text is displayed in another application
or device, the same problem remains.
One obvious way to get around this issue is to avoid
using left-to-right text (like English) in combination with
right-to-left text (like Arabic). When mixing left-to-right
and right-to-left text can not be avoided, the order of
the sentence will need to be reversed manually. This will
allow you to upload your file to another application and
display it correctly.
Alignment and Formatting
Your written content should be aligned to properly display
and wrap text at the end of each sentence. If not, the order
of the words and the meaning of the sentence will be incorrect.
Fortunately, most applications have tools that can change
the writing direction of the text. For example, markup languages
like HTML have tags you can add to your code to adjust the
"DIR attribute" and specify the base direction
of text (LTR, RTL).
Most Middle Eastern countries use both Arabic and Hindi
character sets for numbers. There is no consistent use amongst
bidirectional language users and the choice of which digits
to use is often determined by which character set the software
supports.
Whether you use Arabic or Hindi digits, numbers are written
from left to right - with the most significant digits placed
farthest to the left (Figure 6). Of course, this is the
opposite of bidirectional text, which is typically right-to-left.
|
Michael
Lombardi
DTP Specialist
Michael is opposed on general principles
to broccoli and cell phones, and hates to see either
being used in a moving automobile. |
Punctuation
Punctuation can also be a challenge in bidirectional
localization. For example, the exclamation mark, period,
and colon are displayed the same way in both Arabic and
English; while others, such as the question mark, comma,
and semicolon are displayed differendy When punctuation
marks that are displayed the same are added to the end of
a sentence in some text editors, they automatically move
to the beginning of the sentence unless they are in the
middle of a line (Figure 7).
Conclusion
Localization is much more than just translating from
one language to another. When localizing into a bidirectional
language, you have to adjust the layout of the user interface
and reformatting of your application to make it usable.
[ Table
of Contents ]
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