

Ask HN: My friend wants to translate interfaces. How would these be delivered? - thecooluser

A friend of mine has recently started doing translation work and I want to help her setup a website where she could translate interfaces for web apps, and then maybe mobile apps later on.&lt;p&gt;I&#x27;m only technical enough to setup a website but have very little programming experience so my question is:&lt;p&gt;What&#x27;s the most convenient format for a translation to be delivered in?&lt;p&gt;Like, would she deliver them as a spreadsheet? Or a comma-separated text file, or an XML file, or something else?&lt;p&gt;I imagine there&#x27;s many methods of handling translations between different methods of making software, but any nudges in the right direction would help. :)
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informatimago
That depends on the target tool for those translations.

The file formats for translation files for MacOSX/iOS (.strings files), for
Android (strings.xml files), for Linux (.po files), and a multitude of other
development environments, are all different.

If one was to provide a tool for translators to work on this kind of
translations, what one could do is to keep the translations in a database
(original string/language, translated string/language), and have little tools
to convert the various file format into and out of the database.

Using a database would help recalling common strings.

Now, in translating interfaces, not only strings need to be translated. If
only, for some interface definitions take human input to adjust widget size
according to the text (which is of different size in the different language),
but also because translating involves more than just the text. Right-to-left
script systems may need different layouts than left-to-right script systems.
Icons may need to change according to the culture relative to the language.
(And data may need to be computed or formatted differently according to the
language, but this is for the developers to care about).

Therefore beyond the translation of strings, a UI translator will need to
master the development tools used to edit the interface layouts (Xcode on
MacOSX or iOS, eg. eclipse on Android, etc), to be able to provide a
comprehensive translation service.

Perhaps considering some professional tool already developed would be a good
idea? [http://kilgray.com/webshop/](http://kilgray.com/webshop/)

~~~
thecooluser
Thanks for the help. Much appreciated. :)

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hrktb
The client should provide the format.

If a site is designed to have multiple languages, the site devs must have
settled on a way to switch between the languages, and so they already came
around with a file/data format that matches their system. Instead of trying to
guess, the best thing for everyone would be to have a copy of an existing
language file and translate the content from there.

PS: same for apps, of course.

