Right-to-left design is not a translation job

Everything mirrors: layout, navigation, icons that imply direction, and the order in which the eye reads a screen. Text alone is the small part.

What actually flips

The reading order reverses, so the eye lands top-right instead of top-left and the visual hierarchy has to be rebuilt around that. Navigation moves. Progress indicators run the other way. Back arrows point the other way — and a back arrow pointing the wrong way is not a cosmetic error, it is a control that means the opposite of what it shows.

Carousels are the one everybody misses. A gallery that swipes left-to-right in an Arabic layout reads as running backwards, and the customer stops trusting the screen without being able to say why.

What does not flip

Numbers stay left-to-right. Latin brand names stay left-to-right. Phone numbers, prices, SKUs, email addresses — all of them keep their direction inside a right-to-left sentence, and handling that correctly is what separates an app built for the language from one that had a switch thrown.

Why a half-done job costs more than not doing it

An interface that flips the text and leaves the structure alone reads as machine-translated. In a market where a meaningful share of customers are perfectly comfortable in English, that is worse than staying in English: it says the store made an effort and did not care enough to finish it, which is a statement about everything else the store does.

Decide at the start

Building for right-to-left from the beginning is a design decision with a cost attached. Retrofitting it is a rebuild of every screen. It is one of the few app decisions where the order genuinely changes the price.