I have an application that currently support 'en' and 'fr' locales, and maintain one language file for each locale i.e. 'en.json' and 'fr.json'
Now for the user from USA, locale comes in as "en_US", Canada 'en_CA', British 'en_UK' etc.
So now as a best practice, is it recommended that I maintain different files for different English Locales or I treat all English locales (en_CA, en_US, en_UK) as 'en' locale and refer to one file for all?
As usual, it depends.
Typically, you will only have one English file, containing English-international messages. In this case, you won't maintain separate files for each version, but instead you will fall back to English international (having a request for en-US, en-CA, etc. you will serve messages from en.json).
Judging by your nickname, you probably know that sometimes it is better to maintain separate messages for some specific cultures for which English-US messages (typically used as international English) might be simply way too direct.
If there is a request for separate locale version (i.e. en-IN), you would serve messages from the specific file (i.e. en-IN.json), but fall back to en for each other language (en-GB, en-AU, etc.).
Resource fall-back (which is the term specialists use for what I described above) could be quite painful to implement. Sure, usually you would fall back to base language (en for any en-XX), but there are some corner cases which you need to know: Portuguese/Brazilian Portuguese, Norwegian and Chinese. In case of Portuguese you should use pt-BR (i.e. pt-BR.json) and for requests to pt or pt-XX fall back to pt-BR, as Brazilian Portuguese is now the standard one. Obviously, it could be easily done by simply creating one file pt.json and let anything fall back to pt.
This is not the case for neither Norwegian nor Chinese.
There are two versions of Norwegian language:
Norwegian Nynorsk (locale nn-NO)
Norwegian Bokmål (locale nb-NO)
There is also so-called macro language (locale no).
Unless you maintain two separate versions of Norwegian (which is unlikely), you should use one resource file (i.e. no.json <- sounds funny, isn't it?) and fall back to it for any requests for nn-NO, nb-NO, nb, nn and no-NO (I believe simply no will be covered).
The Chinese is even more complicated. You may have heard about Chinese Simplified (locale zh-Hans) and Chinese Traditional (zh-Hant). If you'll ever need to localize into Chinese, it make sense to maintain two separate Chinese files (i.e. zh-Hans.json and zh-Hant.json) and fall back any requests as follows:
zh, zh-CN and zh-SG to zh-Hans
zh-HG, zh-MO and zh-TW to zh-Hant
I hope it gives you better understanding. It is worth to consider future localization plans to implement the resource fall-back mechanism as simple as it could be done (but no simpler). If you'll ever need to support languages like English, French, Italian, German and Spanish, there is no point in implementing complex rules - simply check if xx-XX.json exists and serve it if it does, if not check if xx.json exists (serve it...) or fall-back to default application language (en.json, I guess?).
Related
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).
We are migrating our app from iOS6 to iOS7 and we use programmatic way of creating view (rather from storyboard or nibs).
We are trying to support multiple countries with different languages.
Example,
English for - China, India, US
Simplied Chinese for- Taiwan, China
There can be custom override's for specfic country from the basic language localization set.
Now I need to have a common base for language bundles and country specific bundles.
Common Language Bundles: (base language bundles)
en.lproj
zh_hans.lproj
Country Specific Override Bundles: (if i have custom text for each specific countries)
ch(ina)_en.lproj
ch(ina)_hans.lproj
us_en.lproj
Problem:
Resource files (Translations) have to be duplicated for each countries(chinese, taiwan) with english, chinese. How can we avoid this ?. Images are also duplicated sometimes, it is a maintenance problem, if we start support more than 10 countries.
Android supports delta overrides of translations for each language translation per country, do we have anything in iOS similar to that ?.
I know it is not supported out of the box from iOS. What is the right way to achieve the same without duplicating the resources ?. Any hints or ideas to achieve the same ?.
Thanks,
Alex
I hope I've understood correctly.
1a.Image files will only need to be duplicated per language if they contain text or "imagery" that requires translation otherwise there should only be one version. From memory, you select which image files you want to be translated.
2a.A translation is needed for each language you want to support - there is no way round this (obviously). These usually live in "strings" files which you send off for translation.
2b.If you don't supply a specific translation for a string it defaults to the "base" translation. Unfortunately, I don't know how this would work with two "base" translations or even if this is possible as usually the base translation is the language you developed in. You will need to investigate further.
2c.You will need to manage deltas to your strings file yourself - through GIT perhaps? This is annoying but do-able although there may be third-party products that can do this.
Say you have a localized resource that is in en.lproj and Base.lproj. If someone runs the app in, say, Spanish, is the Base.proj resource loaded over the en.lproj one?
Generally, what happens when an resource for the user's preferred language is not found, and when does the system fall back to Base resources?
Base is used whenever the translation for the user language is not define. Including if you have done 99% of string transition to "French", and you should display one of this 1% left on a French iPhone => the base will be use.
I like to have base = english. If a user did not have is natural language translated, he will se the english version.
Some people think different. We all have our reason ;-)
They said, use "code" for base, if you miss to translate you will see code instead of english. Easy to "debug" missing translation.
I said, if you miss to translate a string, the user will see the english version. He will probably said "Oh no ! again this english ! This soft is not well translate !". I already be in that situation 1000 times may be more. Nethertheless, I was able to translate the english sentence to my natural language... not sure to be able to translate a "code"...
If none of your defined languages is not equal to the one which the user has its phone language, then the Base takes place.
Suppose you have 3 localizations, english, spanish and french, and of course you have your based localize. If french or spanish or english are not the phone language, then the base specified by you will be set.
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).
I'm creating an English translation for a program written in German (i.e. all strings within tr("...") are German). Users who are in a non-English non-German locale will probably want to see the English translation, but with the program as it is now they will see German.
There are some ways to solve this problem:
Check if it's a German locale and force to English otherwise.
Present an option to the user.
Make the programmers change their source code to English.
What is considered best-practice for internationalizing where the source code is not in English?
These are two separate questions.
The best practice is to not use any kind of hard-coded string in the sources.
Strings should be stored in external files and loaded by ID.
But what you have there does not sound like the best practice. Might be too much work to get it there.
What you describe (the tr("...") stuff) sounds like gettext (or something similar).
That approach for gettext (and similar libraries) is that "the stuff in the sources is the ultimate fallback", used if the strings for the desired language are not present.
In this case I would go with "Present an option to the user."
You can't assume the user knows English.
Real example: in Switzerland the official languages are Italian, German, French and Romansh. If I ask for French and it is not present, then the next best option is probably German, not English. I Canada the official languages are French and English, so if I as for French and is not available, the next best option is probably English.
I think the best option is asking the user (during installation probably).
Change the source to English is too costly and not worth it. I live in Brazil, we have tons of codes in Portuguese and translating to English wan't necessary one time (we do make software to english speakers). Unless you have a client that requires you to do so (usually when you are selling the source also).
Hope it helps
OK, so I guess the three options are:
Recompile the program with translated strings.
This is fraught with danger as you'll end up with two copies of the source. Bug-fixes in one will need to be done in the other. And then, what happens if you need French? Italian? Spanish? The only advantage of this approach is that it's feasible for a non-developer to do the work. (Just about.)
Resource out the strings, and automatically check what the UI locale is on load.
Here the strings are replaced with GetResource("key") or similar. On load the program automatically translates to the user's culture. This might work, but I know plenty of German-speakers who have English-language culture installed on their PCs but who would prefer German language programs at some points.
Resource out the strings and give the user the choice on load
In general it's always best to give the user control. This might be a prompt on load, although if the application is used often this can be an annoyance. Perhaps a balance is to ask the user during installation for their preference and then give then an option in a dialog to later change this setting.
Note, by the way, that translation is not localisation. For instance: number formats are quite different in Germany (e.g. 1.233,44) from English (e.g. 1,233.44). Icons and suchlike often have national characteristics.