How to do fast localization for Android & iOS App

How to do fast localization for Android & iOS?

In our daily development life, Client needs multiple language support for their app. So we have to spend a lot of time to translate strings into multiple languages. It not only for android development but it also for iOS development.

So now it’s time to say bye-bye typical job to convert app to multiple language manually. Google already have formula to translate strings into multiple languages using its Google translation kit.

let see on this blog how to do fast localization for android and iOS app.

Android have by default Translations Editor. use this tool when you have an app that supports multiple languages. Translations Editor provides a consolidated and editable view of all of your default and translated app text. so that you can view, manage, and localize all of your string resources in one place. see more details about Translations Editor.

we are familiar with trivial steps of creating or adding translations by creating separate values folder for individual locale. ex. French, Japan, Germany etc. and creating strings.xml file for Android. Instead of adding translated values to each keys using Translations Editor, we prefer using the automated creation of string resource values from Google Sheets.

The below steps briefs this procedure clearly.

Open google sheet in browser
Create a new spreadsheet
Create 4 columns. Key, English Translation, French Translation (for French) and French Translation Values.

French Translation Column will use below formula to create values automatically by reading English Translation column values.

Formula:
=GoogleTranslate(B3, “en”, “fr”)

In place of “en” we can use keyword “auto” for auto detecting language.
Translated String (Android) column aims at creating values that we can directly copy paste in string.xml belonging to ‘values-fr’ folder.
Ex: For “Hello” value will be “Bonjour”.
This value will be created automatically applying Google Formulas for the cell value.

Formula

=”<string name” & “=” & char(34)& A3&char(34) & “>” & C3 & “</string>”

Now copy all values of “Translated String (Android)” column and paste them inside tag string.xml file created under “values-fr” folder.
Similarly, we can add translations for iOS projects also making use of below formula

=char(34)&B3&Char(34)&char(61)&char(34) &C3 &char(34)

We need to add column “Translated String (iOS)” and copy paste above formula in a 1st cell of that column. To add remaining values in the same column follow same drag method.

Get google sheet for above formula.

How to use this sheet?

Step 1: Make a Copy of this sheet: File->Make a Copy
Step 2: Keep your key from existing string.xml file in Column 1 (Applicable for Android only)
Step 3: Keep your English reference String (Applicable for iOS only)
Step 4: Keep your new translation in column 4 and 5, apply formula for column 3 by drag method
Step 5: Apply the formula from column 4 for Android and Column 5 for iOS (By Command + Drag)

That’s it… Isn’t it a pretty easy!!!

You can add new columns for different languages using following translator codes for different languages.

Here is translator code for different languages.

Language	ISO-639-1 Code
Afrikaans	af
Albanian	sq
Amharic	am
Arabic	ar
Armenian	hy
Azeerbaijani	az
Basque	eu
Belarusian	be
Bengali	bn
Bosnian	bs
Bulgarian	bg
Catalan	ca
Cebuano	ceb (ISO-639-2)
Chinese (Simplified)	zh-CN (BCP-47)
Chinese (Traditional)	zh-TW (BCP-47)
Corsican	co
Croatian	hr
Czech	cs
Danish	da
Dutch	nl
English	en
Esperanto	eo
Estonian	et
Finnish	fi
French	fr
Frisian	fy
Galician	gl
Georgian	ka
German	de
Greek	el
Gujarati	gu
Haitian Creole	ht
Hausa	ha
Hawaiian	haw (ISO-639-2)
Hebrew	iw
Hindi	hi
Hmong	hmn (ISO-639-2)
Hungarian	hu
Icelandic	is
Igbo	ig
Indonesian	id
Irish	ga
Italian	it
Japanese	ja
Javanese	jw
Kannada	kn
Kazakh	kk
Khmer	km
Korean	ko
Kurdish	ku
Kyrgyz	ky
Lao	lo
Latin	la
Latvian	lv
Lithuanian	lt
Luxembourgish	lb
Macedonian	mk
Malagasy	mg
Malay	ms
Malayalam	ml
Maltese	mt
Maori	mi
Marathi	mr
Mongolian	mn
Myanmar (Burmese)	my
Nepali	ne
Norwegian	no
Nyanja (Chichewa)	ny
Pashto	ps
Persian	fa
Polish	pl
Portuguese (Portugal, Brazil)	pt
Punjabi	pa
Romanian	ro
Russian	ru
Samoan	sm
Scots Gaelic	gd
Serbian	sr
Sesotho	st
Shona	sn
Sindhi	sd
Sinhala (Sinhalese)	si
Slovak	sk
Slovenian	sl
Somali	so
Spanish	es
Sundanese	su
Swahili	sw
Swedish	sv
Tagalog (Filipino)	tl
Tajik	tg
Tamil	ta
Telugu	te
Thai	th
Turkish	tr
Ukrainian	uk
Urdu	ur
Uzbek	uz
Vietnamese	vi
Welsh	cy
Xhosa	xh
Yiddish	yi
Yoruba	yo
Zulu	zu