It takes a while. First, read it from left to right, not right to left. Then, of course, the letters are not connected to each other. But other than that, it reads "Marhaba bikum fi London," welcome to London. .sdrawkcab tsuj s'tI (It's just backwards.)
It doesn't rise to the level of showing the South Korean flag while introducing North Korean athletes, which miffed the North Koreans (who tend to be very miffable) no end. But it does raise the question, doesn't anybody proofread this stuff before it goes up? It's not as if there are no Arabic speakers in London. And somebody bothered to get the phrase translated (correctly) but didn't know Arabic goes from right to left?
On that note, let the games begin. And let us all ponder this question: in Ancient Greece, did the Olympic Games have an official shopping center?
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4 comments:
More likely, whoever assembled the banners was given the Arabic panel with no indication of which way was which, and lost the coin toss.
Actually, this is most likely a software problem. A lot of printing programs don't process arabic script properly, so someone probably sent a correct text to the banner company, who then put it into their program which wasn't designed for R to L languages, and then this is what came out.
I wonder if an early version of Android might also be implicated. Early versions wrote Arabic with separated letters -- right to left, not left to right, but with the letters separated. My original Droid phone still does this, but my Android tablet does Arabic correctly.
There are two common software problems that causes this:
1. Failure to preserve or process the right-to-left markers, or infer them from the glyph language.
2. Absence of the joined-up versions of the arabic glyphs from the font, or an inability to process them.
As you note, earlier android systems, disappointingly, had the 2nd problem.
Odds are, it was correct when it left the customer.
FWIW I've seen this problem before in London, at Victoria train station. I (and I'm sure others, including employees) reported it, and in fairness the signs were re-printed pretty quickly.
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