Localizing your android app

Intro

Following up on what we did last time here.

Our application started to have different audiences with different languages, so we want to localize our app.

Steps

The good thing is that we have a few texts to change and we already using a reference to the strings.xml

/*
file located in::  src/main/res/layout
*/
android:text="@string/my_button_text"

which have this value

/*
file located in:: src/main/res/values/strings.xml
*/
<resources>
    ...
    <string name="my_button_text">Click!</string>
</resources>

Update all the text inside your app to use strings.xml

We also have the text we use for the toast inside our MainActivity.java

Toast.makeText(getApplicationContext(), "Clicked!!", Toast.LENGTH_SHORT).show();

So first thing first let's use the strings.xml instead of having the text inside the main file by doing the following update the strings.xml to have a text for the toast

/*
file located in:: src/main/res/values/strings.xml
*/
<resources>
 ...
    <string name="toast_text">Clicked!!</string>
</resources>

and update the MainActivity.java file to use the new text

Toast.makeText(getApplicationContext(), R.string.toast_text,Toast.LENGTH_SHORT).show();

Now we updated all the texts around our App to use the strings.xml values.

It's time to translate our strings.xml

Right-click on the strings.xml, select the Open Translations Editor

After that, you would need to click on the globe icon, to choose the language you want to support, I'll choose Arabic

The last thing is to fill in the values for each text

And the android studio will generate a new strings.xml file for the language you just selected.

Here is the result

Congrats!! now you can support any language you want and have more audience around the globe

See you in the next part

Photo by Dollar Gill on Unsplash