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. Japanese is not the only language that has done this, pretty much any writing system derived from Chinese did the same thing (for example, a good deal of Chinese temples have signs across the entrance written right-to-left).In this current globalized world, nothing is more important in ensuring wide markets for software than correct understanding of the various aspects of localization. You'll see it if you look at images from prewar Japan, though (a good example might be propaganda posters). left to right (because, unlike with scripts like Arabic, you don't have to modify the actual letters in any way).Īs a result, with extremely few examples, any example of right-to-left horizontal text you'll see in modern Japan is either historical or historically-flavoured (or period-correct, if it appears within fiction). Since WWII this usage has been replaced with writing horizontal text the same way Western languages write horizontal text, i.e. Most of the time this was restricted to places where text didn't really fit well vertically (e.g. This meant that since you start on the right when reading vertically, you started on the right here as well.
pre-WWII), horizontal text was treated as a single row of vertical text. Your Wikipedia knowledge is correct - vertical Japanese is top-to-bottom, right-to-left and historically (i.e.
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