How do you localize your iPhone applications?

Question

Hi,

I want to localize my iPhone applications into other languages except from English, but I don't know anyone who would speak Italian or French.

How do you translate your application name, description and application contents into other languages? Who may help in this issue? Are there any iPhone-oriented translation companies?

Thank you in advance.

Answer 1

There are lots of companies that do this. From expensive ones that make little sense, to just a guy in the country you're interested in who knows english real well and would be happy with $20 and a thank you. You could:

• Google for the more established services
• release your product and mention in your about page that you are looking for translation assistance from your users and hope they like your product enough that they contact you
• use a service like Amazon's Mechanical Turk to bid it out to an individual

Answer 2

I would start by building a framework that makes it easy to localize. Ultimately, somebody is going to have to translate it, but you might want to start by removing any string literals from the actual application itself and replace them with references to some sort of data source. I've never done it with iPhone, but this is common with multilingual web-apps where they have all string literals stored in a database and the fields are populated at runtime based on the location. This makes it exceptionally easy to localize because, if all you are doing is reading an XML file, you only need to swap out the file.