Here i present small but powerful web instrument for public localization of applications and some more thoughts on software translations, which soon will be published as open-source after some tests in real projects.

Public localizator (beta) – is online web solution for fast translation of application strings to many languages by its users. Of course if you have money to invest in localization by paid services – it will be better solution, but if you have project which has wide range of users, which are interested in translation why not to create interface for them. As i had some positive experience of user translation i decided to create simple web tool. This approach is much better than sending some files/tools to your translators –  translation is easy, its continuous process and you can monitor progress at any time.

As for technologies used – here is used standard mysql/php approach which is the most easy to install on any hosting. You will have mysql database which you can parse and even create realtime update of strings inside application via web requests without recompilation.

 

As i use simple text files for localization in my engine (its not xml format like in android folder but still its not a problem to write converter to any format).

 

Administrator can see the list of english strings as token-value table with some additional options. I probably will add something here but at the moment you can add comment to string and set is_short flag to indicate to translator that he should take length of label into account.

Translator will see the list of suggested languages, current translation progress, last activity for each language.

When one is clicking on desired language the list of localized strings will appear, where you can add or edit any string. If string was submitted by another user you can propose your suggestion, which should be accepted by administrator later.

When localization is completed you can export the list of strings into text file.

TEST

As practical application i created section for online localization of Alive Numbers 2 (android project: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.calibvr.minimal ) available here: http://vitiy.info/localization/alivenumbers2/

There you can make Alive Numbers 2 to support your native language. The list of languages – Bulgarian, Danish, German, Spanish, Finnish, Franch, Croatian, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Lithuanian, Latvian, Norwegian, Dutch, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Slovenian, Serbian, Swedish, Turkish, Ukrainian, Vietnamese.

I plan to release the code as open-source after test flight.

THANKS:

• Spanish support as first success. Thanks to Iván Linares.
• Thanks to Marcus Sundman for swedish localization.

Please note – this localization tool is in beta state – please contact me in case of any errors, bugs, etc.