When the reading direction flips: a Hebrew book comes out in English

When a Hebrew book comes out in English, the reading direction flips: it opens from the other side, the pages run in reverse order, and the reader's eye moves from left to right. For most books, which are just continuous text, you barely notice. But anything built on that direction, like the cover, illustrations, tables and timelines, needs checking. And some of the things that seem natural to flip are exactly the ones you must not flip.

What changes in the reading direction itself

A Hebrew book opens from the right. Its front cover sits on the side that, in an English book, is the back cover.

When the book comes out in English, all of that flips. The front cover moves to the other side, and the reader turns pages the opposite way. A page that was on the right side of a spread is now on the left.

In a regular text book this is a technical matter the person laying out the book takes care of. In a book with pictures, it changes the meaning of every spread.

The cover: more than swapping text

The cover of a Hebrew book was designed so the eye enters it from the right. The title, the author's name, the figure on the cover are all placed according to that direction.

When the cover moves to English, the eye enters from the left. A cover that worked beautifully in Hebrew can suddenly feel off balance. We wrote about this in does a translated book need a new cover.

And on a printed book, the full cover, the one that wraps around the book, is made of a back, a spine and a front. When the direction flips, the front and back switch sides. You can't take the full cover file and just swap the text in it.

Illustrations: why you don't mirror them

The first temptation is to flip all the illustrations like a mirror. If the direction flipped, let the pictures flip too. That's almost always a bad idea.

A flipped illustration changes things the reader will notice. Lettering inside the picture, like a shop sign or a name on a door, turns into mirror writing. A character who writes with their right hand is suddenly left-handed. A real place the reader knows looks scrambled. And faces, which are never completely symmetrical, suddenly look slightly wrong.

The right way is to leave the illustration as it is and check every spread: is the text still where the eye meets it? Has anything important been swallowed by the spine?

Children's books: where it's most noticeable

In a children's book, the illustrator thinks about the direction of page turns. A character running toward the edge of the page draws the child to turn it. A surprise waiting in the next spread sits on the side the child will reach last.

When the direction flips, the character suddenly runs toward the spine instead of the edge of the page. The surprise is revealed too early.

There's no single fix for every book. Sometimes you swap the order of the two illustrations in a spread. Sometimes you move the text. Sometimes you accept it. What matters is going through every spread and asking what it does to the reader, not just what it says.

Tables, numbers and timelines

Nonfiction is where the small problems hide.

Tables. In Hebrew the first column is the rightmost one. In English it's the leftmost. A table translated without reordering the columns will read backwards.

Timelines and diagrams. A timeline that runs right to left in Hebrew needs to run left to right in English. A diagram with arrows needs checking arrow by arrow.

Numbers and foreign words. Hebrew text mixes in lots of numbers, English names and abbreviations, and they're written in the opposite direction to the text around them. In an English translation all the text flows in one direction, which usually simplifies things. But sometimes a punctuation mark that sat in the right place in Hebrew wanders to the wrong place, or a phone number shows up reversed. It's worth reading every page with lots of numbers carefully.

What to check before you upload

A short list:

• The full cover was redesigned for the new direction, not just translated.
• Every spread with an illustration was checked: the text is readable and nothing important is swallowed by the spine.
• No illustration was mirrored without a good reason.
• Tables, timelines and diagrams were reordered for the new direction.
• The table of contents and page numbers match the new order.

If your book is mostly text, most of this doesn't concern you, and the person laying out the book will handle the rest. If it has pictures, tables or design that leads the eye, give this time. On which file to send for translation so the design is preserved as much as possible, we wrote which file to send for translation.