How are you? Of course, we hope you’re well, but this is also a way of introducing the topic of punctuation in translation.
When posing a question in French, for perfect punctuation, there needs to be a non-breaking space before the question mark: Comment vas-tu ? The same question, translated into Spanish, would begin with an inverted question mark: ¿Cómo estás?
Given that Arabic, Urdu and Persian are written and read from right to left, perhaps it isn’t surprising that questions in those languages end in a mirror image of our ‘standard’ question mark (؟). However, to keep us on our toes, Hebrew (which is also written right to left) uses a standard question mark. Meanwhile, Greek uses a mark which resembles a semi-colon (;) in place of a (?).
All of which is a roundabout way of saying that “a good translation needs good punctuation”. Next time, speech marks.
