Websites that can help in localization of Android apps for free

[Wrichik Basu]

After publishing two apps on Google Play recently, I am currently looking for ways to translate my apps to different languages. In Android, all the strings used in the app are placed in the strings.xml file. If the app is installed on a device that is using a different locale, Android will first check whether a string resource file is available in that locale. If yes, it will use that particular translated resource file; otherwise it will use the default file. String resource files for different locales are put under different folders. The default will be res/values/strings.xml. The translated version in Bengali (India), for example, will be res/values-bn-rIN/strings.xml.

For translating my app into different languages, I will have to rely on help from enthusiastic users. I need an online service that can help me make it easy for people to translate the app. I should be able to upload the default string resource file, and the website should then list the strings. People will simply be able translate them; they should not need an account on that website. Once the translations are complete, the website should allow me to download the strings in an xml format such that I can directly use them on Android. My apps are all open-source and hosted on GitHub, so if the website allows integration with GitHub, it will be a bonus.

Anybody aware of such free websites? From a GitHub repo, I found crowdin.com. It was advertised as free, but once I created an account, they said that I am in a trial period of 14 days.

 

[anorlunda]

Your request reminds me of Tom Sawyer's Fence from American folklore.

I think you should just use your programming skills to pull out all those strings, send them to translate.google.com, then put them back into the new file. Once debugged, it should be able to translate your strings into any other language in 0.2 seconds.
Here's a link to the translation API.

https://cloud.google.com/translate/docs/apis

 

[Wrichik Basu]

I think you should just use your programming skills to pull out all those strings, send them to translate.google.com, then put them back into the new file. Once debugged, it should be able to translate your strings into any other language in 0.2 seconds.

I can use Google Translate, but it is not always accurate. I know because I tried it while translating one app to Bengali, and the translation it gave was not always making sense. I can put up those translations for verification by people, but unless verified I am not going to put them in my app.

 

[pbuk]

Crowdin is free for open source projects that meet the conditions here https://crowdin.com/page/open-source-project-setup-request

If your projects are not open source I think that hoping for someone to provide a valuable service to you for nothing is rather ambitious (although it worked for Tom Sawyer).