As George Carlin says: In comic strips the person on the left always speaks first.
How about in non left-to-right languages, like Arabic? And how are syndicated strips published when translated into these languages?
Is there an appropriate transform, (like printing a mirror image of the strip, for instance) so that the flow of speech is maintained as per the original and depicted properly for readers in the language of publication?
Or do the strips get printed as is, with just the text in the target language within the bubble. In which case a reader would potentially follow the panels in one direction and keep scanning in reverse to read each bubble?
Are they funny?
There are far too many Baldwins. The only Baldwin I care for is a piano …
This has nothing to do with the question at hand, but I thought I’d share an experience I had with Arabic.
I played with a copy of Microsoft Word in Arabic once. Of course it goes from right to left which is funky to western eyes. But another thing I didn’t realize is that some of the characters are written differently when they’re at the beginning of a word, the middle, or the end. So as you’re typing, already entered characters will change based on their new position. Another trippy thing is that there are characters that are the equivalent of two characters, let’s pretend that “sh” is one of them. You press the “sh” key, and the character appears on the screen. Now when you press the backspace, the character changes into something else (in this made-up example, “s”). When you press the backspace a second time, the character disappears.
This is an interesting, if inane, question. The only thing that I can tell you is that in a year of living in a country where the written language is right-to-left, I never saw any Western cartoons in newspapers. That probably makes it easier.
Yup, and when they publish translations in the U.S., they flip the drawings so the scenes flow in the correct direction (left to right). Normally you wouldn’t notice it though. It’s surprising how few asymmetric things there are out there. Or rather, things that look wrong when seen in a mirror image.