In this unit, you will create a “Hello World” app that can be localized to other languages, as well as pseudolocalized to LTR (left-to-right) and RTL (right-to-left) pseudolocales.
You might be surprised at how easy it is to create a localized application on the Android platform. Android Studio provides all the tools you need, including an emulator if you don’t have an Android device. This unit assumes you have Android Studio installed.
The first step to create a localizable app for our purposes is to follow Google’s instructions to create a simple “Hello World” app with Android Studio.
For the purposes of this unit, launching your app in an emulator is more useful than installing it on a phone or tablet. Android Studio comes with an emulator module built in.
You are going to replace the generic “Hello, world!” in the beginner app with a custom string. The text field on your app’s layout should contain a reference to a string in the default strings.xml file. You can name the new string something like hello, and it can contain anything you can distinguish from the old string, such as “Hello, hello!” – just so you can distinguish it from the old string when you run your app again.
To pseudolocalize your app, you must set the pseudoLocalesEnabled flag in your build.gradle file. Fortunately, this is a simple procedure.
Add the pseudolocales en_XA and ar_XB to the emulator with the Custom Locales application.
The en_XA pseudolocale is a LTR locale, and the ar_XB pseudolocale is RTL.
If you’ve done everything so far correctly, all you have to do now to see your two custom pseudolocales in action is select them (one at a time) and launch your app.
Completing the localization process is only slightly more complex. You’ll need to make a copy of the values folder with the name of the new locale appended, and then copy the default strings.xml file into it, translating each string it contains into your target language.
If you do not translate a string, the corresponding default string will be used. Important: If there is no corresponding default string, your app will crash when it tries to display the missing string.
Much as with the pseudolocales above, you can test your app’s new locale simply by selecting it in the Custom Locales app and restarting your application.
This has been a short demonstration of how software is localized on the Android. Localizing a complete application would be more complex, of course, but the steps above provide the basics to do so.