Hi Ruth :) This will be very very, very cool. Thank you so much. Take good care, arslan

I've had occasion recently to look this problem over, despite not being a speaker of any right-to-left languages, and there are two major parts of the problem here:

1) String translation (which Koha handles with Pootle) 2) Layout translation (things flushing right instead of left, table column order, and so on).

Koha handles the string-translation part very well, *if* the translation team has done that work; many translations remain only partial, so there are still lots of English words appearing on the pages. Naturally, anyone bilingual who wants to help Koha grow should be encouraged to participate (at http://translate.koha-community.org) in getting the strings translated!

The layout-translation? Not so much. The code automatically inserts 'dir="rtl"' in the html tag at the page header, for languages so designated, but the default CSS still contains many 'float: left' and 'text-align: left' directives, which causes the pages to look very strange for right-to-left readers. It is that problem I've been looking into, and I believe I have a solution in the works; it is functioning on my OPAC test server on my laptop, with English and Arabic installed, and behaving the way I would expect it to.

My solution has four requirements: 1) It cannot disrupt left-to-right pages; if a library has both English and Arabic as choices, both need to work. 2) It should be generalized, so that any RTL language can use it. 3) It should be semi-automatic; at most, a system-preference needs to be set to make it work. 4) It should *not* be a complete new set of templates, which would make upkeep a bigger problem.

The approach I'm testing right now meets all four of these requirements; you just translate the templates with the script at misc/translator/translate, as you do now, and enable the language in the system preferences, as you do now, and it Just Works. There is still some CSS tweaking and testing to be done, and the task of extending the solution into the staff client, but I'm on it.

After I finish this patch, hopefully in the next week or two, I will be releasing it for the community; it should easily apply to 3.6.x, 3.8.x, and master.