I find it out that dealing with text translations in Android is difficult. There are some discussions about this topic, but I haven't found a definitive good solution yet. (which is weird since I believe there are tons of apps that need to manage translations. Also, I assume Google wants to provide better-quality apps and internationalization plays an important role in this)
What I am trying to achieve:
Extract strings.xml into an Excel that I can later share with others (translator, native person,..)
Convert that Excel file back into strings.xml
This is an ongoing process. As I am developing new features, more strings get added/changed, thus the above process needs to be repeated
Of course, there is the well-known Translations Editor in Android Studio. Unfortunately, with the new versions of IDE, it does not allow you to copy/paste data into Excel so you can later share it with others
There is the option of installing an older version of Android Studio from here that lets you copy/paste data from Translations Editor. (this is dumb in my opinion)
Also, I found other partial solutions:
A third-party plugin that converts .xml to .csv (link here). Unfortunately, it does not seem to work anymore
A website that takes your strings.xml as an input, and provides translated strings.xml in any language you choose (it users Google Translate). - not exactly what I need
Another website where you can upload the strings.xml and get the .csv file. - it partially solves my problem
What would be ideal for me is a version of Translations Editor that is online and can be edited by multiple persons at the same time
Does this solution exist? How are you dealing with this issue?
Related
I want to open a .dwg file in my own Android app.
Is there anyone who knows any good development tool that can help me.
I am trying to find it but just getting nothing related to it. I think very few people use it.
Also, I want to know, how these apps work to open cad files which would be developed.
The main problem here is that .dwg files have a lot of different versions, and more importantly this format is proprietary, apparently not well documented or not documented at all. And of course, it's not simple data that we are talking about, so good luck for reverse engineering the format yourself.
A look at the wikipedia page for .dwg seem to give some interesting information for your project :
There is already some open source reader developed for this file format, namely LibDWG - free access to DWG
(...)
This is a library to allow reading data from a DWG file. That's a very
important acquisiton, which may improve a lot the ability of the free
software comunity to develop more features in the field of computer
technical drawing (CAD).
The DWG structure is very complicated, it seems to be crafted so that
none can easily understand it. That's a strong reason to not use it,
and that's also why we do not provide the writing feature in the
library. One should use LibDWG mainly to read such files, filtering
them to some other format, free and usable.
(...)
I think this is the developpment tool you wanted.
It is a tedious task to localize app's for multiple languages, and very often the same work is done over and over again:
For example, phrases like "OK", "Cancel" are in almost every android app.
Localization of mobile apps - Any resources available for the basics?
This question is 3 years old, I wonder if anything changed since then.
Are there any comprehensive libraries/collections which take care of this? So that I only have to translate the actually app-specific strings?
I would suggest using the Google Translator Toolkit. It supports the various localization files. It also has support for iOS and Android localization files.
Example: For Android you can upload your strings.xml you can select to which files you want to get it translated. It is automatically translated by Google Translate. It uses different colors to display how sure Google Translate is about the translation, and gives feedback about things that needs to be changed in the translations.
You can also use a translation memory. This is a database with saved translations. You can create a personal Translation memory. This contains all the translations you made. You can also use the global TM.
The global TM saves and stores translations from Translator Toolkit users everywhere. Please note that the global TM is available for anyone to see and use.
You read more about it on the support page
It has an editor build in which allows you to change the automatically translated words/sentences. You can export the translations as strings.xml again, so you can use them straightaway in your Android project.
A disadvantage: I don't think it is possible to switch between localization formats, so you have to translate all sentences for both the iOS and Android version.
You can read more about it on the support page
I know how develop a multilingual app in Android.
The following link explains how to do so.
http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/resources/localization.html
Assume that I release to the market my app in 3 different languages developed with the best practices described in the link above in mind.
If I want to add a new language I have to republish a new version. Is there a good way to avoid republishing the app if I add more languages?
It is important that the application detects the correct language according to the language of the smartphone.
If you are using the standard localization framework then the answer is no, because all the localization files are looked up in the res folder at runtime. And to update the res folder, you need to update the apk.
The only possible way to do what you want is by coding your own localization framework, which, intuitively, should not be too hard. (Your have a function that searches for a string in a file, and the file is determined by the language). The bad thing is that you would need to set all the strings on your user interface objects programmatically.
I am .NET developer and currently working with WPF and ASP.NET MVC 4. The next project I should start will be a web application with good chance to later create clients for desktop/mobile/tablets. In other words, this application could be used from the web browser but also from native applications on Android, iOS, WinPhone8 and Windows Desktop (WPF). I have very limited experience with iOS development and none with Android dev.
One of the features I plan to have in this product is ability for users to select a language on which they want to use GUI, be it in web browser or any other client. Thus I need to create localization solution that would work with all platforms I plan to support. Since I am starting this project with first creating the web app in ASP.NET MVC I am not interested in using Microsoft's default support for localization via resources files (.resx) since that wouldn't be portable.
What are different options out there for creating multi-language support in apps deployed for various platforms? The first idea is to use XML files but I am also interested in exploring other possible solutions that might already exist out there. Any ideas on how to approach this problem are welcome.
First of all I'm not sure if your question should be addressed to the Android and iOs developers (using the iOs and Android tags) because if the client loads content provided by the server then the most common way to do this localization (i encountered very often) is to provide different URL's for different languages, probably with a parameter in the url, something like wwww.yourserver.com/en_us/otherstuffhere where en_us should be the country code and in this way the client can change the URL that will use for the following requests.
Of course it's rely hard to localize all the app using a server content, especially UI components such as button titles, placeholders etc. for these there are proper ways to localize them using iOS and Android OS features for localization.
P.S I have no idea how Windows phone OS works.
As far as I know, there is nothing really out there that would do what you want.
Most systems work well with JSON.
What you could do, is use any of the .resx to JSON solutions that are out there and just store all your localization strings in resx and then automatically convert them to JSON for other platforms.
Forget about one solution, just use whatever format the plattform offers and use a tool like Trados or Transifex to manually convert the different formats.
I'd recommend to use whatever format given platform has native, otherwise you will cause you lot of extra troubles.
You can then either use some tools to convert and merge these formats (translate-toolkit is great in this) or use some translation platform which will allow you to translate all of them in one interface. Transifex (service), Crowdin (service) or Weblate (service or instalable) should be able to do this.
Weblate can help you also with keeping them in sync, I don't think others have such feature (I'm author of Weblate).
My team is on its way to create our first game for Android and we're discussing a lot of things concerning the game's development. We've got one person which will test the game throughout the whole process. Usually, during the testing process, we give the tester an access to configuration file which contains a lot of constants that are used in the game.
But on Android, however, everything is deployed to an .apk file. Therefore, we cannot simply let the tester edit a traditional configuration file for testing, because the whole package needs to be rebuilt. It makes the tweaking process a lot less comfortable. Should we then create a function which would read a plain text file from a strictly set location (on phone or sd card) or can you think of any better solution? How do the other companies in Android games industry do it?
What is more, I'd like to mention that we will be developing the game with Marmalade - so if there's a solution that is especially good or bad while using Marmalade, please take it into account.
Thanks in advance.
I guess you could set all your constants in a SharedPreference object. This way those constants would be both user-editable (with a default value) and saved between two runs.