Upside-down and back-to-front

No, this isn’t a puzzle to test your back-to-front reading skills… Looks unprofessional, doesn’t it? And yet, speakers of Arabic and other right-to-left languages (such as Farsi, Urdu, Pashto) have to put up with this all the time! Text that’s back-to-front, or even letters that are back-to-front AND in the wrong order.

Unless you have Arabic installed as a language on your computer, it’s quite likely that Word and other programmes will display Arabic text from left to right rather than right to left – and if you don’t read Arabic, you’ll be none the wiser.

This can all be avoided by hiring a human translator, who can check the text direction and send you a PDF if necessary, or check from a screenshot that the text is the right way round before you get it printed 😉