For example, if you add a Brazilian translation for your app description but not a Portuguese translation? Will Portugal see the Brazilian or English?
According to Apple's documentation each regional store is associated with a primary and auxiliary languages. e.g. UK English would be a supporting language in the USA store.
Likewise Brazilian and Portuguese dialects would be primary and supporting languages in their respective stores.
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I am using Google Translator for multilingual support. As far as I googled, it provides only Brazilian Portuguese & not European Portuguese. Is there any other translator/API(Free or Licence) that could provide European Portuguese. Please suggest.
I am pretty sure google translate covers European as well as Brazilian Portuguese.
Just entered a bunch of words that are only used in Portugal such as
Descapotável
Fixe
Aferrolhar
Gajo
and they provided the correct translation into English. I did have to set the source language as Portuguese ( if left to autodetect in some cases it failed to detect the language )
The google api documentation shows both Portugal and Brazil as being covered ( see code 'pt')
In my experience, the most consistent translation matrix between American English (en_US) and European Portuguese (pt_PT) that's available online is the DeepL Translator/DeepL API. Their paid offering, DeepL Pro, takes it a step further to supplying formal and informal tones for both regions and represents the pinnacle of machine translation for European Portuguese that I've personally used.
Bing Translator also offers an explicit choice between European and Brazilian Portuguese translations and does a fair job at minding the differences, though it appears less nuanced about the vernacular usage than DeepL.
Both of these are far superior to Google's offerings when working with Portuguese. As a participant in their Crowdsource project and the support forums for it, according to the Google representatives there (as of Q4 2021), there remains no official plan to fork the Portuguese part of the database into Brazilian and European variants despite years of requests for it.
This is my problem. I have this simplified chinese and spanish translations that I am about to add to my application. When adding these localizations to my app I am presented with a list of locales like
Simplified Chinese China
Simplified Chinese Macau
Simplified Chinese Hong Kong
Simplified Chinese Singapure
Traditional Chinese China
Traditional Chinese Macau
Traditional Chinese Hong Kong
Traditional Chinese Singapure
and I have also an option that is just Chinese.
The same happens to spanish, a lot of specific spanish options plus just spanish.
How does this work? I mean, is this option Chinese a kind of "wild card" that will work for all people speaking chinese, independently if their devices are set for tradidional or simplified in any country speaking chinese?
You can read all about the variations of Chinese here: Varieties of Chinese. Bottom line is that different variants relate to geography and geopolitics, so be careful and make sure the translation you are getting is one you want.
The situation is similar with Spanish. Plain ("es") is presumed to be European Spanish. See Spanish Dialects and Varieties for more info.
To your question, "ES" is generic, in the sense that it will be the fallback Spanish language on the device. If you only have a localization for ES, then that localization will be chosen whether you select "Spanish" or "Spanish (Mexico)". From linguistic standpoint, the common meaning for "ES" is European Spanish.
With Chinese, the story is a bit different. There is no generic Chinese to fall back to. If you intend to target mainland China, go for Chinese (Simplified). If you want to target Chinese population outside China, simplest choice is Chinese (Traditional).
I'm currently in the process of localising my iOS application. When I go to my project, under the localisation menu when I click the + button, I get a list of languages to pick from, for example French (fr). Also, at the bottom of that menu there is a sub menu titled "other", that menu has loads more languages to pick from, but they are all like French Belgium (fr-BE) and English Canada (en-CA). Can someone please explain how this works and what the difference is between French (fr) and French Belgium (fr-BE) ?
Thanks.
In such a locale string, the first two letters describe the language, the second two letters describe the region.
The same language may be spoken differently in different regions. I'll assume from your username that you are most familiar with the English language. In English, there are significant differences between the same language as used in different regions. Some of those are:
vocabulary: in en-GB "boot" is the storage room in the back of your car, in en-US, it's something you put on your foot, the car thing is called "trunk"; in en-GB, "football" is a sport where you play a ball with your foot, in en-US, it's a sport where you play an egg with your hand.
spelling: color–colour, favorite–favourite, program–programme, …
pronunciation: in en-GB, aluminium is pronounced aluminium, in en-US, it's pronounced aluminum.
Localization is also about much more than just the language. It's also about currency (pound vs. dollar), date formats, number formatting, phone number formatting, address formatting, collation, etc. All of those depend much more on the region than on the language. In fact, in regions with multiple languages (e.g. Switzerland, Belgium), they will usually be the same across languages.
Now, since you asked specifically about Belgium: Belgium is a tri-lingual country, and even though there is a sharp divide between the three regions, the languages influence each other. So, the French spoken and written in Belgium is heavily influenced mostly by the Dutch spoken and written in Belgium, which the French spoken in France isn't. The French spoken in Canada, because of the great distance to France, has developed independently of it, and is in some ways closer to what was spoken in Revolutionary France than today. Ergo, it makes sense to distinguish French as spoken in Canada, France, Belgium both from each other as well from "French in general".
They are different versions of French. The English you hear in the UK is different from the one you hear in USA or in Canada. Apple gives you the possibility to be as precise as possible with localizing a language.
I'm planning to release an international app so I want to provide localization for all the supported languages on the iPhone. Does there exist such a list?
And what would you think would be a bare minimum of languages supported?
The official list of supported iPhone languages is in Settings app > General > International > Language.
I think you'll find this page useful:
http://www.small-apps.com/2012/02/which-language-where/?lang=en
It basically lists all languages supported by the App Store for localization of the app description. The problem is that most languages are not officially supported, so they all fall back to a default language (eg. both Norwegian and Polish show the UK English description).
I would say the bare minimum is English. The recommended minimum is EFIGS: English, French, Italian, German and Spanish. And if you want to reach everyone, you localize for all 18 languages supported by the App Store.
I am uploading a new App which is localized in 10 languages to the Apple AppStore.
Apple offers several languages with country specific options such as
Canadian French
Mexican Spanish
Brazilian Portuguese
We have set up localizations for French, Spanish and Portuguese.
On the iPhone, an App defaults to the closest language available. For example, an iPhone set to "Brazilian Portuguese" will use the regular Portuguese localization instead of the English default localization.
Is it the same on the AppStore? Do we need to also set "Mexican Spanish" or will customers from Mexico default to Spanish (instead of the defaulting to English)?
edit:
To clarify, this is not about whether we should localize to these dialects (we already decided against that when making the app), but whether the store page shown to the customer will be displayed in the closest dialect or english.
For example, will a Mexican user automatically see the Spanish version (the closest language) or the default language (English)?
I can confirm that the closest available language is selected by the App Store.
For example in the Mexican App Store if you have Spanish set up but not Mexican Spanish, Spanish will show up. This app has Spanish activated on iTunes but not Mexican Spanish and everything is in Spanish on the Mexican App Store.
https://itunes.apple.com/mx/app/id502222888
The language that is displayed on the App Store depends also on the user's language settings since they set the language query parameter. The URL format used by Apple with the language query parameter is:
https://itunes.apple.com/tw/app/id502222888?l=zh where tw is Taiwan and l=zh is the Chinese language.
The language query parameter is not always used.
For example in Germany, even if you set the another language via the query parameter it will be ignored and the German language will show up since it is the only language for that location:
https://itunes.apple.com/de/app/id502222888?l=fr
While in Canada that has both English or French, you can use the language query parameter:
https://itunes.apple.com/ca/app/id502222888?l=fr
To answer my own question: No, Apple does not automatically choose the closest language on the AppStore.
Here is an example of the Mexican AppStore using English despite standard Spanish being present:
Let's start with Spanish. As far as I know Spanish (Mexico) is considered International Spanish, which is fairly similar to English (USA).
I don't know about French, so I might be wrong here but I believe French (France) would be perfectly understandable by the Canadians.
As for Portuguese... Well, in this case you did something that I believe should be the other way round. I read on the Internet that Portuguese government (?) recently pass a reform so that regular Portuguese would be similar in terms of grammar with Brazilian Portuguese. You see as Brazil is much bigger country, Brazilian version is much more common. Therefore I don't think it is OK to use regular Portuguese in Brazil (there might be some problems) but it is probably just about right to use Brazilian Portuguese in Portugal.
There is also the case of Chinese. As in Simplified vs Traditional. If you ever going to localize your application into Chinese (not the easiest thing to do), Traditional is the one to be used in Hong Kong, Taiwan and Macao whereas Simplified is the one they use in China (mainland) as well as in Singapore.
It would be very inappropriate to confuse them (i.e. try to sell Simplified version to the Taiwanese).