Fun discussion. On 5 Maj, 21:17, Jim Graham <[email protected]> wrote: > On Sat, May 05, 2012 at 09:31:00PM +0400, Kostya Vasilyev wrote: > > And if you ever decide to have a Russian translation, just send me your > > XMLs and I'll do them for you. > > Thanks. I might just do that, if I go back to the idea of doing > translations. Of course, I'd need a lot more people offering to do > other languages first. Right now, I'm still in the process of building > this monster, learning a lot of stuff I didn't know how to do before in > the process (and it's continuing to look and function better and better, > with more features added every week[1]).
You really should prepare your program to be translated now, as it is.a huge work to do it later. To know how it will work, you could translate your program to some kind of street English so you can see that you don't forget some string. There are a test locale based on English spoken in Denmark, en-DK which isn't a real one. You can use that ;-) > > Also of note: for some locales a two-letter language code is not enough. > > Consider "pt" vs "pt-rBR", also "zh-rCN", "zh-HK", "zh-rTW" just to list > > what comes to mind. Languages could be different between countries, just look at English- speaking languages. And many countries have many spoken languages. Like Switzerland (3) or China (lots of dialects and languages). And to make it more complicated, there are more than one scripture to write in too. Just look at all that are supported by Unicode (utf-8 is a compressed form of Unicode, so just stick to that). So to extract all strings that appears in the UI in external files is a good thing, even if you "only" knows English. And I haven't even started to talk about how to print floating point or currency or or dates or physical things like length or volume. You should really start using metrics and ISO dates, all of you! :-) So, even though you don't know the languages, don't make it harder than it need to localize your program later. And yes, you should have it done by humans. > I didn't know that.... I hope the guy who brought that up in one of the > Stack Overflow posts that Raghav pointed me to knows that.... He might, or not. We who must learn more than one language usually have it easier to understand the problems with translation. Especially if you know non-germanic ones. 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 '.'? > Thanks, > --jim > > [1] I have some physical/mental limits (limited energy resources...all > from cancer #1 blah blah) which, if I work on it too much in any > given day (or set of days), can leave me unable to even SEE the > code, much less work on it, for several days to a week, with > migraines to go along with it. I have to be very careful..... > On those off days, I tend to read the dev guide for more info > on upcoming stuff, new ideas, etc. That is good thing to do. Happy localization to you. :-) -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Android Developers" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/android-developers?hl=en
