In reply to Jeff Chandler.

While I congratulate this particular theme shop for adapting their themes to make them translatable and accessible to RTL languages, I agree with Justin that this has been the standard for premium themes and also a lot of free themes for quite a while.

There are a lot of themes on WordPress.org that are not only translation-ready, but that also ship with translations for certain languages. Making these themes more easy to find for users is on the roadmap for the WordPress.org Theme Repository.

Also on the subject of adding i18n support, the steps outlined in the article are great, but there is much more to the subject than that. What we are talking about is the baseline support, after which all the fine tuning starts to make translating the theme a great experience.

In terms of marketing themes, if a shop wanted to have a real impact, they would hire professional translators and make their themes available fully translated into the languages they want to target.