How to create a multi-platform localization solution?

Question

I am .NET developer and currently working with WPF and ASP.NET MVC 4. The next project I should start will be a web application with good chance to later create clients for desktop/mobile/tablets. In other words, this application could be used from the web browser but also from native applications on Android, iOS, WinPhone8 and Windows Desktop (WPF). I have very limited experience with iOS development and none with Android dev.

One of the features I plan to have in this product is ability for users to select a language on which they want to use GUI, be it in web browser or any other client. Thus I need to create localization solution that would work with all platforms I plan to support. Since I am starting this project with first creating the web app in ASP.NET MVC I am not interested in using Microsoft's default support for localization via resources files (.resx) since that wouldn't be portable.

What are different options out there for creating multi-language support in apps deployed for various platforms? The first idea is to use XML files but I am also interested in exploring other possible solutions that might already exist out there. Any ideas on how to approach this problem are welcome.

Answer 1

I'd recommend to use whatever format given platform has native, otherwise you will cause you lot of extra troubles.

You can then either use some tools to convert and merge these formats (translate-toolkit is great in this) or use some translation platform which will allow you to translate all of them in one interface. Transifex (service), Crowdin (service) or Weblate (service or instalable) should be able to do this.

Weblate can help you also with keeping them in sync, I don't think others have such feature (I'm author of Weblate).

Answer 2

First of all I'm not sure if your question should be addressed to the Android and iOs developers (using the iOs and Android tags) because if the client loads content provided by the server then the most common way to do this localization (i encountered very often) is to provide different URL's for different languages, probably with a parameter in the url, something like wwww.yourserver.com/en_us/otherstuffhere where en_us should be the country code and in this way the client can change the URL that will use for the following requests.

Of course it's rely hard to localize all the app using a server content, especially UI components such as button titles, placeholders etc. for these there are proper ways to localize them using iOS and Android OS features for localization.

P.S I have no idea how Windows phone OS works.

Answer 3

As far as I know, there is nothing really out there that would do what you want.

1. Most systems work well with JSON.
   What you could do, is use any of the .resx to JSON solutions that are out there and just store all your localization strings in resx and then automatically convert them to JSON for other platforms.

2. Forget about one solution, just use whatever format the plattform offers and use a tool like Trados or Transifex to manually convert the different formats.