In places like Australia and America, if you have a group of people and you’re going round them (e.g. reading in turns or playing various card games), you’d be more likely to go clockwise from on top rather than counter-clockwise.
But in India, they naturally go counter-clockwise from on top rather than clockwise, and I once saw someone playing a game of hearts on a phone there, and it was going counter-clockwise.
Localisation definitely entails more than just translating strings. Layout and functionality changes can be involved.
Dealing is done either clockwise or counterclockwise. If this is omitted from the rules, then it should be assumed to be:
* clockwise for games from North America, North and West Europe and Russia; * counterclockwise for South and East Europe and Asia, also for Swiss games and all Tarot games.
For better or worse left-to-right has "won" in programming-land and I fully agree with alangpierce that it's the natural choice for evaluation order as well. We read left-to-right and the computer should as well. That's one of the main problems I have with Python. Evaluating right-to-left just feels like being contrarian.