Objective c/cocoa: How to write a proper multilanguage app?

Question

Is there any way to easly manage the label and other text in the appliatcion for support multilang?

Thanks

Answer 1

The short answer is no. You as the developer are going to be intimately involved with internationalizing every user-visible string and cultural assumption in your application.

The long answer is to read Apple's internationalization documentation, understand how resource look-up interacts with localization directories within the bundle structure, get familiar with NSLocalizedString() and its relatives, and play around with some .strings files and changing your system language around in order to get a feel for how what you're doing will affect the end-user.

When it comes to localizing information contained in XIBs, you should read Wil Shipley's article "Lost in Translations." You might also want to look at how open source Cocoa projects such as Growl and Adium handle internationalization and localization.

Answer 2

I believe Apple's Introduction to Internationalization Programming Topics is best suited for your needs. I would recommend checking out both "Preparing your nib files for localisation" and "Localising string resources" on that page as they are most frequently used in multi-language apps. Make sure you know how they could work for you.

Answer 3

There is not a simple answer, just read their tutorial (as you should always do when digging into a new aspect of Apple developing):

http://developer.apple.com/internationalization/