
Ask HN: How do you do internationalization in your apps? - bloomca
I worked on several projects with i18n (from the frontend prospective), and all the time collaboration with translators always took a lot of time. We&#x27;ve used external solutions (which was pretty low-level JSON storage), our own internal solution, but still, this friction was really hard.<p>How do you tackle such problems, so translators could easily change text on their own with the confidence, that they will change only needed parts?
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seanwilson
I've helped several times now with transitioning English only projects to
supporting multiple languages and it's always going to be messy to be honest.
There's never one way to do it, the text to translate is always stored in
several different places (e.g. in web page text, URLs, common strings,
documents, images) and the tools the translators need to use will differ (e.g.
maybe a WordPress plugin, spreadsheets, gettext app or web interface). It's
going to vary project to project is what I mean and it's very dependent on how
your project is coded.

This post about localising the game Papers, Please has lots of good examples
of project specific issues:
[http://dukope.tumblr.com/post/83177288060/localizing-
papers-...](http://dukope.tumblr.com/post/83177288060/localizing-papers-
please-papers-please-was)

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steven_braham
I always use the "best practice" way in a project to generate translations.
Most programming languages or frameworks have a translation practice or
library that is widely used.

I always build my apps first in English. Often you can create an export of all
strings that need to be translated. I translate them myself or send the file
to a translation agency.

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billconan
I'm also wondering about this.

I have seen some service where you can list very thing you need translations
as a list. And hire others to translate them for you. And generate code to
embed the translations into your app.

but I don't remember the name of the service.

