When providing education language translation services for multiple languages it can be quite challenging to maintain style and formatting consistency. Obviously, the language itself is always unique but have you ever thought about the myriad ways that numbers can be presented?
Nowhere is this linguistic diversity more startling than when working with non-Arabic numerals. To explain, Arabic numerals are the 10 digits most commonly used in English (e.g., 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, etc.). The Arabic numeric style is used in English as well as many other languages such as French, Somali and Vietnamese. However, there is a whole host of languages that use completely different character sets for numbers. In the Middle East, they use what is referred to as the Eastern Arabic numeric system (e.g., ٠.١.٢.٣.٤.٥). To minimize confusion, I will refer to Arabic numerals as English language-style and Eastern Arabic numerals as Arabic language-style.
When undertaking language translation for an Arabic-speaking audience, you should consider whether the Arabic (English language-style) or Eastern Arabic (Arabic language-style) numeric system should be used. If you used the English language-style of numbers would that actually decrease comprehension for your Arabic-speaking audience?
Or, imagine if you received a translated document and you were expecting English language-style numbers. Perhaps your Spanish and Russian translators used English language-style numbers, whereas your Arabic translator used Arabic language-style numbers. Not recognizing the Arabic language-style numbers, you might think that the Arabic translator completely missed the mark and didn’t include any numbers at all!
Being aware of unique language attributes such as numbering systems can minimize confusion and make your documents more readable for your English Language Learning (ELL) audience.
Keep Learning!
Maggie
K12Translate
Tags: Arabic
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