Changing Your Orientation: Designing your work for different languages and scripts

by Patrick Hofmann

phofmann@quarry.com

For those of us who are lucky enough to write and design materials for international markets, there's no better feeling than knowing that your work is reaching parts of the globe that we've never visited. 

Getting the Basics

To address our international audiences effectively, we have learned to organize and automate our documents for easy translation, to avoid using expressions and images that may be interpreted differently by some cultures, and to continually find helpful and memorable internationalization rules along the way:

• avoid using hand and arm gestures in any images, as some are considered obscene in many countries
• estimate that other languages will typically require 30% more space than English in your online and hardcopy page designs
• be careful when using images of checkmarks and Xs, as they may represent rejections and selections in some countries
• avoid implementing and documenting keyboard commands (for example, Ctrl+Y is impossible to execute on a Portuguese keyboard).

Knowing How It Will Be Read

But before we enthusiastically follow these rules, let's take a step back. Before we plot our words or images and design the layout of our canvas, we must ask: how will our various international users read our work? Will they all read in the same direction? Do they scan and read their pages in the same manner that we do? If so, do those directions differ between online and hardcopy information? By considering these questions, we discover that we may need to change the orientation of our work, and design it to accommodate the different directions of different languages and scripts used on our planet.

Learning From the Past

Ten years ago, when we developed our first global wordless manuals for Hewlett Packard, we took reading direction and page orientation into account when laying out our 40-page installation guides. As shown in the diagram below, we came up with a neat design compromise. If readers of Greek, Latin, and Cyrillic alphabets read left to right, Japanese and Chinese alphabets traditionally read top to bottom, and Arabic and Hebrew cultures read right to left, why not rotate our manual by 90 degrees so the spine is at the top? Given the technical expertise and Western-awareness of our primary users, this step may have been considered unnecessary. But, in the end, this small gesture was greatly appreciated.

Getting Better

Interestingly enough, this multi-directional melée seems to have subsided somewhat with Web-based information. Although traditional Japanese and Chinese was written top to bottom in columns that went from right to left, today it reads left to right just like any Latin script. The unique exceptions are Arabic and Hebrew, whose alphabets still read right to left, but whose languages have adopted left-to-right numbering and a lot of apparently hip English. Nonetheless, the page designs for Web-based information in Arabic and Hebrew are still unmistakingly reversed: corporate logos appear in the top right; radio buttons and checkboxes appear to the right of their associated text; dropdown list arrows and scrollbars appear on the left side; and search results and directory trees cascade from right to left.

In the end, most of the joy of producing designs and documents for an international audience happens not after it's published, but before it's started. Whenever you get a chance, casually surf your way to international Web sites whose orientation, script, direction, and layout are dramatically different from ours. Observe the choices of colour, imagery, and typeface, and recognize how interactive elements are positioned and ordered. Honestly, it's almost like being there!