ANIHC FO KNAB
Monday, 11. February 2008, 13:48:13
Before you ask… I’d better explain what my “photo” is.
It’s not me. 
But you’ve noticed that already. Me observing the world would describe it better.
The photo illustrates a — to westerners — very curious phenomenon in Chinese. Or rather, two, combined. The first is that since there are Western companies and brand names in China, and increasing floods of tourists (especially this olympic year) who are helped by signage in English as subtitles to Chinese, latin characters have become “adopted” as Chinese characters. The second is the way Chinese is written: the most usual now is like English: from left to right and top to bottom. But it can be written top to bottom as well, with the columns going from left to right, or from right to left; in certain typographical circumstances the columns can end up being one character high… and you end up with a row of characters from left to right or from right to left. All of that is perfectly valid in Chinese.
This photo was taken inside a bank’s branch office, looking out through the door. The horizontal bar holds the door handle, and the door opens on the right. I was struck by the text in latin characters and took this picture, thinking it was somehow mirrored, but mirrored incorrectly. 
Only later did I realize that this was not the case. Have a look at this logo, captured from Bank of China’s website: same graphical logo, same Chinese characters, same latin capital letters.
The circumstance of the door with the door handle on the right dictated right-to-left script here: the eye is automatically drawn to the door handle, and one starts to read from there: the graphical logo, then each of the Chinese characters (none of them mirrored), then each of the latin characters (also none of them mirrored): the latin characters treated as grown-up Chinese characters, and subject to the same rules.
It only looks odd to us, not to the Chinese, for whom this is perfectly normal.
