Localizing Your App

General
1

In addition to Dana’s blogpost something about the space you’ll need for text in multilingual apps:

I’ve learned when I was doing lot’s of software-translation for a local bank:

  • translate into German and add 8% of the number of characters of the German translation;
  • or from Dutch, add 12% of the number of characters to get the number of characters you should be able to display in any case.
    (This will normally be enough to cover the differences in character widths.)
    What i did:
  • copy the data from the translation-table and add “____]” to every string. The number of underscores is calculated;
  • put this data into you app and see if every single text-display is suitable. If not enlarge the length of the label, button etc.;
    Doing so you will seldom see translated text not fitting in the space you’ve got for it.

EDIT - fixed the URL

2

URL does not work

3

http://blog.xojo.com/

4

Thank you for notifying, I hope one day I would get translations as well.

My applications hold English and German localizations for now (native_lang=ger).

5

[quote=343945:@Joost Rongen]In addition to Dana’s blogpost something about the space you’ll need for text in multilingual apps:

I’ve learned when I was doing lot’s of software-translation for a local bank:

  • translate into German and add 8% of the number of characters of the German translation;
  • or from Dutch, add 12% of the number of characters to get the number of characters you should be able to display in any case.
    (This will normally be enough to cover the differences in character widths.)
    What i did:
  • copy the data from the translation-table and add “____]” to every string. The number of underscores is calculated;
  • put this data into you app and see if every single text-display is suitable. If not enlarge the length of the label, button etc.;
    Doing so you will seldom see translated text not fitting in the space you’ve got for it.

EDIT - fixed the URL[/quote]

what i did instead is make the font one size smaller for german language.

6

For some controls feels a bit unhandy to me. What about the headertext of a listboxcollumn ? What about the caption of a tabpanel ?

7

just look at the code in my application and it does not cater for listbox or tabpanel

8

Ok Richard, it’s just what works for you, as long as you achieve what you need to.
My way worked perfectly fine for me.

BTW greetings to both of you and lots of success running the business.

9

Another addition for localizing iOS apps.

UIKit in iOS has a very handy function to automatically set the font size according to its contents.

This code can be used (with some minor modifications) to adjust the font size on

  • Labels
  • Buttons
  • Table cells
  • And more

Declare sub setAdjustsFontSizeToFitWidth lib "UIKit.framework" selector "setAdjustsFontSizeToFitWidth:" (id as ptr, value as Boolean) setAdjustsFontSizeToFitWidth label.handle, True

With the above function, localizing an iOS app is much simpler.

10

[quote=344427:@Joost Rongen]Ok Richard, it’s just what works for you, as long as you achieve what you need to.
My way worked perfectly fine for me.

BTW greetings to both of you and lots of success running the business.[/quote]

we use language table with column for screen name and control name and then column for english, german, french and italian. another table for errors in different language e.g. column for error id, error in english, german, french and italian.