Monday, June 29, 2015

charts - Right to left graph labels for right-to-left languages


When building a graph or chart for use by right-to-left languages such as Arabic should the labels also change? For instance it is generally accepted in my English speaking culture that lower numbers are on the left and higher on the right


|-----------|-----------|-----------|-----------|
2001 2002 2003 2004 2005

Would this flip to look like?


|-----------|-----------|-----------|-----------|
2005 2004 2003 2002 2001


I hunted around to find examples but I could find examples of both graphs which maintain the left-to-right ordering even when presented in an Arabic context and those which switched.



Answer



Short answer is don't put years in reverse order for Arab audience or other languages like Hebrew or Urdu which is written right to left.


Numerals in every language are written left to right and putting lower values on the left and higher on the right is standard. Considering that, it is a standard to have lower values on the left and higher values on the right which also holds true for years.


No comments:

Post a Comment

technique - How credible is wikipedia?

I understand that this question relates more to wikipedia than it does writing but... If I was going to use wikipedia for a source for a res...