In today’s chatty episode, I’ll talk about why I’m passionate about Right to Left (RTL), the practice in localization to adapt user interfaces to users who use software in languages written from right to left, such as Arabic, Hebrew, and Urdu. I’m going to give a background on why languages are written in different directions, how this is implemented technically, and how to apply it to modern user interfaces.

Billions of lines of code running our phones wake us up, serve us the morning news, and show us our friends’ stories. This code runs our computers, which let us call into video conferences and respond to emails. We run our businesses, talk to people, and discover new ideas thanks to these billions of lines of code. The technology is used by everyone around the world, but this code is composed almost exclusively of English codewords. In today’s episode, we’ll explore why English is the language of technology and how this impacts the rest of the non-English-speaking world.

There is a part of your phone that controls your ability to create and consume content on the internet. It’s not the battery life, whether it has 5G, or what apps you have installed. You have likely never given it a second of thought, but for millions of people in the country of Myanmar, this critical detail has shaped their internet experience for decades and will define their lives in the next decade. Today’s story is a tale of two encodings.