Wrong display of formatted strings in RTL languages

[David Planella]

Looking at https://translations.launchpad.net/ubuntu/karmic/+source/language-selector/+pots/language-selector/he/10/+translate

The original string is "%s, %s"

Rosetta displays it (and allows translation) as RTL.

However, it is shown as "s, %s%", where I would expect a mirrored version of the original -> "s% ,s%"

Jeroen's comment's:

«Yes, same in both ff and chromium; the % at the end is actually at the beginning afaict
 then good chance of a marker in the wrong place, breaking up the "%s"»

«there's no rtl or ltr marker in the string as stored in the db either, so this looks like a browser bug that we may have to work around.»

[Данило Шеган (danilo)]

Btw, good way to confirm this is to go to staging and try entering "%s, %s" in the field: it gets messed up.

[Thomas Sibley (thomas-sibley)]

This is affecting Arabic and Hebrew translations for RT (https://translations.launchpad.net/rt). The translated strings displayed in the browser appear differently than they are actually saved due to bidi. Sometimes the appearance in browser looks OK but is saved incorrectly, other times the appearance in browser looks wrong but is actually OK. This is very confusing and frustrating for volunteer translators, especially casual contributors unfamiliar with the inner workings of bidi text.