Ask HN: How do you do internationalization in your apps?

6 pointsby bloomca9 ปีที่แล้ว3 comments

I worked on several projects with i18n (from the frontend prospective), and all the time collaboration with translators always took a lot of time. We've used external solutions (which was pretty low-level JSON storage), our own internal solution, but still, this friction was really hard.

How do you tackle such problems, so translators could easily change text on their own with the confidence, that they will change only needed parts?

3 comments

seanwilson9 ปีที่แล้ว

I've helped several times now with transitioning English only projects to supporting multiple languages and it's always going to be messy to be honest. There's never one way to do it, the text to translate is always stored in several different places (e.g. in web page text, URLs, common strings, documents, images) and the tools the translators need to use will differ (e.g. maybe a WordPress plugin, spreadsheets, gettext app or web interface). It's going to vary project to project is what I mean and it's very dependent on how your project is coded.

This post about localising the game Papers, Please has lots of good examples of project specific issues: http://dukope.tumblr.com/post/83177288060/localizing-papers-...

billconan9 ปีที่แล้ว

I'm also wondering about this.

I have seen some service where you can list very thing you need translations as a list. And hire others to translate them for you. And generate code to embed the translations into your app.

but I don't remember the name of the service.

steven_braham9 ปีที่แล้ว

I always use the "best practice" way in a project to generate translations. Most programming languages or frameworks have a translation practice or library that is widely used.

I always build my apps first in English. Often you can create an export of all strings that need to be translated. I translate them myself or send the file to a translation agency.