How to localize an iphone app for different languages?

Question

Can anyone explain me how to localize an iPhone app ? I am getting confused with the XCode localization concept.

Answer 1

First you may define in your project settings the languages you want to manage. That's not a needed work but it's great to start there.

Then for each of your XIB you want to localize, click on it, go to the property panel and add wanted languages. The unique XIB file will be then dispatched into many files, one for each language. Then just adapt each one as wanted.

It's the same way of doing for images, sounds, or any resource.

For the Strings you may have writen in your code, add a "Localizable.strings" file into your project and add into it some keys like :

"Goodbye_Code" = "Adiós"

and in your code, where you had writen @"Goodbye", replace by :

NSLocalizedString(@"Goodbye_Code", @"Some description : I'm saying goodye to the user that is leaving the app");

In the end, remember that your app may have a default language setting. If a localization is not created, the one that correspond to that default language will be used in place.

You can check those links for further information :

http://www.raywenderlich.com/2876/how-to-localize-an-iphone-app-tutorial

http://www.icanlocalize.com/site/tutorials/iphone-applications-localization-guide/