The direction issue isn't just limited to text. Others like the ones I already mentioned are Urdu and Persian. Languages like these are called bidirectional. For example, if you have a mobile application written in Arabic (or Hebrew for that matter) and you wish to translate it into English, you must pay attention to the fact that both Arabic and Hebrew are written right-to-left and still, numbers are written in left-to-right system thus compounding the issues. And that is just how the characters of the language affect localization.

This of course only applies to the size of the characters themselves and the length of the translated words is again a new hurdle.

It's a fact that Arabic takes more horizontal space than English when in written form, and this is something to consider when thinking of how the application will look on the mobile screen. Of course the first barrier is the actual system of characters the target language uses. Beyond certain specific domains, however, machine translation is currently inferior compared to a human doing the translation. One last term that tends to get mentioned when localization is discussed is ' MT' which stands for 'machine translation, ' meaning translations done automatically without human input. This article will focus on the different text reading and writing patterns found in different cultures, in other words, the right-to-left and the left-to-right systems and how this internationalization directly affects developers in an ultimately beneficial way.īoth ' internationalization' and ' localization' are often abbreviated as ' i18n' and 'l10n' but for clarity, I will use the full terms in this article. The planet has currently 7 billion potential customers but this number is cut to a fraction without proper translation of the services. In this current globalized world, nothing is more important in ensuring wide markets for software than correct understanding of the various aspects of localization.

Why does hebrew read right to left