ios app asian language localization

Question

A client asked me about the effort to start localize in chinese an app that we have on the App Store. I did for other languages in the past but never for Asian languages and I'm worried that it could be a little bit trickier instead of european languages. Most of the content will be returned by RESTFull services via JSON.

Do exist some sort of special advices to to that?Is it just like a normal localization?

Answer 1

Chinese is not that different from other languages, first of all, check the following:

1. Encodings
   Can your encoding handle asian characters? Is UTF encoding used?
2. Fonts
   Are you using custom fonts? Can they display asian characters?
3. Bold/Italics
   Bold and italics fonts are not used often with Chinese, sometimes they are even not supported by the font, since the text usually becomes illegible. Check whether your UI can handle it.
4. Label sizes
   In general, chinese texts are shorter than texts in other languages. Check if your UI looks fine with chinese texts.
5. Font sizes
   In general, fonts displaying chinese should be a bit bigger than fonts displaying normal characters. With latin alphabet you can use very small fonts and the text will stay readable. With chinese you have to check that it is still possible to distinguish the characters when a small font is used.
6. Date formatting
   Are you correctly using NSCalendar from the current locale? Or are you using specific properties of the Gregorian calendar? (China uses Gregorian but I am not sure about other Asian countries).

In all other aspects it is like normal localization. You should probably just put the texts there and then test if everything works correctly. If your application is written correctly, there doesn't have to be any special work involved. Asian languages often show i18n problems which were always in the application but just didn't manifest.