Internationalization and Localization in iOS projects development

April 10, 2012 - PRLog -- According to Apple, the iPhone is currently sold in 80 countries and is expected to continue to surpass this. So Today's applications are marketed to a global audience. To promote your iPhone App to a wider non-English speaking audience requires the customization of your software for each target market.

But in i-OS we have Internationalization and localization.

“Internationalization is the process of designing and building an application to support localization.”
&
“localization is means for correctly converting and displaying cultural information like units, dates, currencies in application.”

Localization and Internationalization are complimentary activities, with one we can display cultural information like units, dates in the user’s preferred locale and the other, let’s us display text in the user’s preferred language.

The first step in the development of an internationalized application is to identify all culture-specific information for your application, like text, images, and sounds and put them into resource files and make sure you are formatting date, time and currency values using the current locale information.

Once your Application's UI is fixed, Then you can create language-specific versions of the nib files, text, images, and sound files for each localization.

Language and Locale Designations

iOS support existing and forthcoming International Organization for Standardization (ISO) standards for the identification of languages and locales. These codes are used in the naming of language-specific project directories and in other places where language and locale information is needed.

Examples of ISO language designations
Language(ISO 639-1)
English   (en)
Japanese (ja)
German (de)
French   (fr)
Chinese   (zh-Hans)
Portuguese (pt)
Dutch (nl)
Italian   (it)
Spanish   (es)
Korean   (ko)
Russian   (ru)

Write Applications for Non-English Speaking iPhone Users:
Localization Folder - iPhone applications developed for both English and other language speaking users, the developer creates the so-called “Localization Folders”. Each language has its own folder. The naming of the folder must follow the convention specified as in ISO language designations table.
String Files –  the translated text is placed in a file called “localizable.string” The file will be placed in the Localization Folder.

This file is simple text file (UTF-16).

The Localization Folder  have other resource files  For example, some graphic files , national flags, country maps or other text and settings that the application will present accordingly to the targeted language.

At SPEC INDIA, we have a well-trained team of iOS project development. Feel free to email us your requirements at lead@spec-india.com.

Happy iPhone programming.

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SPEC INDIA is a boutique ISO 9001:2008 software solutions company based in Ahmedabad, India. Starting its journey 25 years ago, in 1987, with a single support desk, SPEC INDIA possesses sustainable and robust experience in providing complex and diverse enterprise software development solutions to a large portfolio of customers across the globe. It is now over a decade since we have been in the business of IT Outsourcing.