Mobile applications
are built for specific purposes and requirements, but it has to cater to a
wide audience beyond linguistic and geographical barriers. This involves a
great deal of personalization of the application to the users specific language.
Why is
Localization Important?
Below are a few stats
that clearly emphasize why an applications have to be localized.
- 89% of the Internet users are outside the United States
- When it comes to consumer preference 52.6% of consumers
feel that localized content is more important than the price they pay for
the service
- Vendors receive $25 for every $1 spent on localized
content proving consistent return on investment. This has resulted in
71.43% of Fortune 500 companies adopting localization to reach more
customers in the countries they already operate in
English is the
dominant language among application development organizations and as a result
the great majority of apps launch only have an English language option. This
approach has failed, in turn causing reductions in usability and
reachability.
What Does
it Take to Localize an Application?
Every smartphone
platform has provisions for developers to localize content, but one has to
consider all areas in this landscape. Areas of consideration for mobile
application localization include:
- UI context switching
- Handling bi-directional text (RTR <->
LTR)
- Encoding formats for languages like Chinese, Arabic, etc.
- Support from web services and middleware
Localization
Solution Approach in Detail
Be it
Android, iOS or any other mobile application platform, the labels and text
content to be localized are placed inside a XML/JSON based common resource file
bundled within the app package.
This involves carrying out the strings to different resource files with the equivalent text for different languages. A respective key value pair will identify every specific text (). The resource files are
placed inside the folders with the respective language identified by default
values within the OS.
This involves carrying out the strings to different resource files with the equivalent text for different languages. A respective key value pair will identify every specific text (
UI
Context Switching
When the language
context is changed, say from English to French, then it would logically fetch
the localization resources mapped to French language and display the
corresponding text on the user interface. With respect to multimedia
resources (images, audio and video), which require localization support,
mobile platforms/OS provide region-based qualifiers to the resources folder
structure. A resource folder can be differentiated by adding the “-xx”
qualifier to the name, where xx would stand for a specific language (en -
English, fr - French, etc.). This would help the OS to select region specific
resources as well.
- The user interface should be mirrored when displaying
right-to-left languages
- If base internationalization and Auto Layout is
used in iOS, most of the user interface will appear mirrored automatically
- The text direction changes to right-to-left with the
exception of phone numbers and country codes, which are always
left-to-right
- Some views and controls in the user interface may not
change direction automatically which can be fixed programmatically
Handling
Bi-directional Text
Use of standard views
and controls that automatically handle bi-directional text, as described in
Displaying Text is recommended. On creation of custom controls for text
input, bi-directional text has to be handled explicitly.
Encoding
Formats for Languages
There are several
different encoding formats such as ASCII encoding, Unicode & UTF-8/UTF-16 are available but to support
Internationalization UTF-8 can be used.
Support
from Web Services and Middleware
Employ a common
character-encoding format across mechanism either UTF-8 or UTF-16.
The following is an
example of how internationalization should be handled incase of SOAP services.
Localization
in a Mobile Client - SOAP Architecture
