Re: [android-developers] Re: are text files in assets translated to the local language?

Just to throw my $0.02 into this discussion.  I've recently had some very generous users help me translate my app into 3 additional languages, and the points about getting your app ready for localization from day 1 can't be overemphasized.  For those of us who do Android work as a hobby, these points ring true for any other type of application development.  Here's some of the things I've wound up doing and found helpful.  I've just submitted an iOS port to the iOS app store, and as a result of doing all this for Android (for my app "Sun Surveyor"), developing that port with localization in mind from day 1 for iOS was so, so, so much easier.

- Date/Time and number formatting - never hardcode this stuff.  I suggest the use of a (potentially static) Formatter class that can abstract the formatting of application specific strings, numbers and date/time representations.  Of course this class will be using the built in OS Number / Date formatter classes which will be able to work based on the user or OS-set locale.  So abstraction is your friend and is very key here.  I see a ton of apps that don't even respect whether the user's time preference is 12h or 24h when displaying time, which is annoying, since it's really one of the easier things to abstract.

- Resources such as HTML help files, or long or richly formatted strings - I store these in the res/raw-de, res/raw-it, etc folders, as HTML, plaintext, etc and then load them appropriately.

- Simple strings are stored correspondingly in strings.xml in values-de, values-it, etc.  Avoiding having any sort of static strings in your application code as magic strings or constants at all is a good (or necessary) goal.

For iOS it was a matter of writing a quick piece of code to just convert the Android strings.xml files into the Localizable.strings that apple uses.

As part of the iTunes Connect component and as part of the app-store submission component, Apple as a courtesy also provides a directory of companies which offer exactly this sort of translation of string resources, marketing text and application copy (ie html etc).  I can provide some off list, I don't think it's appropriate to share them here as it's potentially spammy.  I've never used any, but mainly because I was ignorant to the fact that they exist, until now.

A lesson learned here was that wow, you can really have more text than you'd imagine in an application, when looking at it from the perspective of localization.  Several other generous users balked at doing a translation because of the volume.  It may also be a good exercise to consider that every unnecessary word in your application copy or application text is an expense.  Some speechwriters and scriptwriters sometimes think about it this way in order to make sure what they write is powerful, clear and to the point.  Of course as engineers it's not the natural hat we wear, but we think of code bloat and technical debt the same way.

On Sunday, May 6, 2012 7:47:37 AM UTC-4, JTeagle wrote:

>It is not actually hard, but there are so much details that you have
>to think of that your program needs to adjust to. A simple one is what
>do the country use for decimal separator? Comma ',' or point '.'?

Another example is pricing - not all locales put the currency symbol in
front of the number, but instead put it behind.

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