[Tails-l10n] translating po files in right-to-left languages

Hi everyone -

My team is working on translating po files for the liveusb-creator,
tails-persistence-setup, and tails-greeter in Arabic and Farsi. Many of the
English phrases contain what look like tags for strings, eg. %s,
%(device)s, %(message)s. Do these tags need to be left as is? And on a
related note, does the interface read translated strings left-to-right for
every language? Or does the orientation change for right-to-left languages
like Arabic?

PoEdit is having some difficulty preserving these strings when dealing with
the right-to-left orientation of Arabic - has anyone else encountered this
problem, and if so, do you have any solutions?

Thanks!
Alayna Ruberg
NDI ICT Team