Our great sponsors
-
-
-
WorkOS
The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS. The APIs are flexible and easy-to-use, supporting authentication, user identity, and complex enterprise features like SSO and SCIM provisioning.
-
Well, I don't know how to put it into strings.xml specifically, but there are localisation systems that handle it without much fuss. It requires a bit more effort from developers and translators, but it's not that hard in concept.
For example, Fluent (https://projectfluent.org/, used by Firefox), or MediaWiki's localisation system (https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Localisation#Message_paramete...).
> Translation and localization costs money
If you have a fan base, you can leverage it to get some amount of translation done. A lot of users are happy to help the product they like get better. Granted, the quality will not be as good as the quality you get with professional translators.
The article also did not talk about the actual the translation process, which in the case of a product that is released but keeps getting updates, is not trivial.
There are tools that exists, but I personally decided to build a workflow around git, with a python scripts that generates a status of all the translations: https://github.com/jyaif/ppl-i18n#status
The downside is that contributors need to figure out how to use github to contribute. The upside is that it's free, you get auditability, versioning, and the barrier of entry may actually increase the quality of translations.
One problem I stumbled upon frequently is codebases that did not support localized formats, but just assumed a certain format to use, for example through concatenation.
There are capabilities built into the programming languages, which allow to format numbers, currencies, etc. with a specific locale. There are also great resources [1] out there that provide all kinds of formats and localized names for countries, currencies, etc.
[1] Unicode CLDR: https://github.com/unicode-org/cldr