The Language translation for the
android apps to support the Localization.
In android apps, if you want to support
multiple languages then you have to provide the strings.xml file for
every language . Now this file is to be there in the values folder
for the languages .
The pattern to create a language folder
is
values-<language code>-<country
code>
→ language code is a 2 alphabets code
that signifies the language like es for Spanish
→ country code is again a 2 alphabet
code that signifies the country or the region in the country like IN
for India, US for america.
→ region can also be defined for a
language being used in more than one regions in a countries with a
'r' prefix to the country code.
Examples of values folder -
values-en-US → this is for english
language in USA
values-it_IT → for italian in Italy
values-it-CH → for italian in
Switzerland.
Now to generate such files is a
cumbersome task if you tend to do it all on your own.
So here is a method to generate the
strings.xml file for every language . What we need to do prior to it
is make a list of all the strings used in the app like this
Play
Share
Details
Hide
OK
File name :
TimeStamp :
Location :
Now in this file you may keep changing
the translations in all languages like chinese simplified
玩
分享
细节
隐藏
好
文件名
：
时间戳
位置
：
So finally we make values folder in our
app res like this for chinese simplified → values-zh_CN with the
strings.xml file from the common values folder so that its having the
tags in the proper format .
Like :
<string
name="play">Play</string>
<string
name="share">Share</string>
<string
name="details">Details</string>
<string
name="Hide">Hide</string>
<string
name="generic_ok">OK</string>
<string name="fileName">File
name :</string>
<string
name="timestamp">TimeStamp :</string>
<string name="location">Location
:</string>
Now here is the Java program that we
may use to generate the localized folder for chinese language with
the <string> tags in it . What we are doing hers is just
replacing the value in the string tag in the above sequence itself
import java.io.BufferedReader;
import java.io.File;
import java.io.FileReader;
import java.io.IOException;
import javax.xml.parsers.DocumentBuilder;
import javax.xml.parsers.DocumentBuilderFactory;
import javax.xml.parsers.ParserConfigurationException;
import javax.xml.transform.Transformer;
import javax.xml.transform.TransformerException;
import javax.xml.transform.TransformerFactory;
import javax.xml.transform.dom.DOMSource;
import javax.xml.transform.stream.StreamResult;
import org.w3c.dom.Document;
import org.w3c.dom.Node;
import org.w3c.dom.NodeList;
import org.xml.sax.SAXException;
public class Mainclass {
public static void main(String argv[]) {
BufferedReader br = null;
FileReader fr = null;
try {
File readFromFile = new File("D:/Localization/strings.xml");
fr = new FileReader(readFromFile);
br = new BufferedReader(fr);
String sCurrentLine;
File fXmlFile = new File("D:/app/src/main/res/values-zh-rCN/strings.xml");
DocumentBuilderFactory dbFactory = DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance();
DocumentBuilder dBuilder = dbFactory.newDocumentBuilder();
Document doc = dBuilder.parse(fXmlFile);
doc.getDocumentElement().normalize();
NodeList nList = doc.getElementsByTagName("string");
System.out.println("----------------------------");
for (int temp = 0; temp < nList.getLength(); temp++) {
if(temp!=1){
Node nNode = nList.item(temp);
sCurrentLine = br.readLine();
nNode.setTextContent(sCurrentLine);
}
}
// write the content into xml file
TransformerFactory transformerFactory = TransformerFactory.newInstance();
Transformer transformer = transformerFactory.newTransformer();
DOMSource source = new DOMSource(doc);
StreamResult result = new StreamResult(new File(fXmlFile.getAbsolutePath()));
transformer.transform(source, result);
System.out.println("Done");
}
catch (IOException e) {
e.printStackTrace();
} catch (ParserConfigurationException e) {
// TODO Auto-generated catch block
e.printStackTrace();
} catch (SAXException e) {
// TODO Auto-generated catch block
e.printStackTrace();
} catch (TransformerException e) {
// TODO Auto-generated catch block
e.printStackTrace();
} finally {
try {
if (br != null)
br.close();
if (fr != null)
fr.close();
} catch (IOException ex) {
ex.printStackTrace();
}
}
}
}
Now this reads the chinese language
strings from the strings.xml file and keeps replacing the content in
the values-zh_CN/strings.xml file to make the chinese localized
strings.xml file.
Few locale codes that I have in my
glossary are :
Language codes can be found here :
http://www.science.co.il/language/Locale-codes.php
Language / Locale
Supported since version
English, US (en_US) 1.1
German, Germany (de_DE) 1.1
Chinese, PRC (zh_CN) 1.5
Chinese, Taiwan (zh_TW) 1.5
Czech, Czech Republic (cs_CZ) 1.5
Dutch, Belgium (nl_BE) 1.5
Dutch, Netherlands (nl_NL) 1.5
English, Australia (en_AU) 1.5
English, Britain (en_GB) 1.5
English, Canada (en_CA) 1.5
English, New Zealand (en_NZ) 1.5
English, Singapore(en_SG) 1.5
French, Belgium (fr_BE) 1.5
French, Canada (fr_CA) 1.5
French, France (fr_FR) 1.5
French, Switzerland (fr_CH) 1.5
German, Austria (de_AT) 1.5
German, Liechtenstein (de_LI) 1.5
German, Switzerland (de_CH) 1.5
Italian, Italy (it_IT) 1.5
Italian, Switzerland (it_CH) 1.5
Japanese (ja_JP) 1.5
Korean (ko_KR) 1.5
Polish (pl_PL) 1.5
Russian (ru_RU) 1.5
Spanish (es_ES) 1.5
Arabic, Egypt (ar_EG) 2.3
Arabic, Israel (ar_IL) 2.3
Bulgarian, Bulgaria (bg_BG) 2.3
Catalan, Spain (ca_ES) 2.3
Croatian, Croatia (hr_HR) 2.3
Danish, Denmark(da_DK) 2.3
English, India (en_IN) 2.3
English, Ireland (en_IE) 2.3
English, Zimbabwe (en_ZA) 2.3
Finnish, Finland (fi_FI) 2.3
Greek, Greece (el_GR) 2.3
Hebrew, Israel (iw_IL)* 2.3
Hindi, India (hi_IN) 2.3
Hungarian, Hungary (hu_HU) 2.3
Indonesian, Indonesia (in_ID)*
2.3
Latvian, Latvia (lv_LV)
2.3
Lithuanian, Lithuania (lt_LT) 2.3
Norwegian-Bokmål, Norway(nb_NO) 2.3
Portuguese, Brazil (pt_BR) 2.3
Portuguese, Portugal (pt_PT) 2.3
Romanian, Romania (ro_RO) 2.3
Serbian (sr_RS) 2.3
Slovak, Slovakia (sk_SK) 2.3
Slovenian, Slovenia (sl_SI) 2.3
Spanish, US (es_US) 2.3
Swedish, Sweden (sv_SE) 2.3
Tagalog, Philippines (tl_PH) 2.3
Thai, Thailand (th_TH) 2.3
Turkish, Turkey (tr_TR) 2.3
Ukrainian, Ukraine (uk_UA) 2.3
Vietnamese, Vietnam (vi_VN) 2.3
