Below is a screenshot from the Arabic interface. Adapting our design philosophy required us to look carefully at every screen in Window Phone and judiciously choose which elements to mirror. For example, mirroring the phone dialing pad or a map would be a very bad idea. If everything was mirrored, the design wouldn’t be too complicated, but in reality only certain things are. So we adopted an approach for these languages that we share with Windows 8: we call it “mirroring” because it reverses the appearance of the screen for these languages. Without mirroring, this would cause the beginning of right-to-left words to flow off screen-not very readable. For example, in Windows Phone, the end of a word often flows onto the next screen. However, early investigations showed this didn’t really work for Windows Phone, mostly because text is such an integral part of our design. This is similar to what some of our competitors have done.

Initially we considered localizing Arabic, Hebrew, and Persian as we do other languages: the text would flow right-to-left, but the screen orientation wouldn’t change. (And you’ll note we managed to get it and a few other top vote-getters added.

Maybe it’s because I’m left-handed, but I’ve always had a special fondness for these languages and was amazed (but delighted) that we had so many requests for Persian in our Suggestion Box forum. Perhaps most challenging are the languages that are written right-to-left, specifically Arabic, Hebrew, and Persian.

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