Android to translate into Arabic

Question

I work with an Arabic translator who translates my .xml lines from English to Arabic. I understand that only Honeycomb or Cyanogen roms will support Arabic rendering, but that's fine.

Our problem is that the text continues to pop up. It seems that some text editors (like Eclipse) obviously do not support text from right to left. And in some cases, the text is not flipped by character, and word by word or parts of the sentence are rearranged ... when copying from Microsoft Word back to the UTF-8 XML file.

For example, the translator provided lines with spaces at each end, and naturally, I wanted to clear them. But to do this turned over part of the text!

For example:
إغلاق التطبيق
become:
التطبيقإغلاق Just removing the spaces at the edges.

Questions:
1. Which editor should I use?
2. Is it possible to mix English and Arabic in one line (for example, the name of the application or other words that should not be translated), or is it basically no-no?

Answer 1

I am currently working on a project in Arabic and English, and I am viewing both languages, so I can provide you my experience :)

Answer to question 1: Any editor supporting UTF8 will do. Now I use both eclipse and notepad ++.

To configure eclipse using UTF8 (for some reason, not the default), go to the window menu → settings → general → workspace, then change the encoding of the text file with deault (cp1252) to another and select utf8, then restart eclipse.

For notepad ++, make sure you install supported locales, including Arabic. It is not checked during installation, and you must check the box to enable this feature.

Answer to question 2: It is absolutely wonderful to mix Arabic and English words together in a sentence. A very good article I found about what is written here http://www.w3.org/International/tutorials/bidi-xhtml/

This article describes design concepts for sites that support rights to left languages ​​(including Arabic and Hebrew), with an emphasis on Arabic, because it is a more complex language, because some letters connect to others, and some do not.

Despite the fact that this article is about website design, it has a good amount of how to mix Arabic and English.

Answer 2

There is an easy way to insert labels from right to left and left to right in any application under the windows:

1- From left to right: ALT + 0254 from the right numeric keypad on the keyboard 2 Left to right icon: ALT + 0253 from the right numeric keypad

When using any special editors or macros, this can be used in any application, whether in Notepad, Word, HTML, XML ... etc.

Hope this would be helpful to everyone

Regards, Your Arabic Translation Team

Answer 3

1- I have developed several Android applications that support Arabic, and I use Notepad ++ to edit the resource file without any problems. Just remember to select RTL from the browse menu (Ctrl + Alt + R).

Almost all Android devices that support Unicode will display Arabic letters, but if the bidi algorithm is not part of a specific version of Android, you can use a special library to correctly connect letters and display in Arabic.

Here is the library I used before

A blog that describes how to use it.

2- In general, I would not recommend mixing Arabic and English, especially if it will include special characters, since it can be displayed awkwardly.

Answer 4

I know the Eclipse part, the default font in Eclipse does not support Unicode, so replace it with the Aria Unicode MS font. To do this, in the Eclipse workspace, click “Windows” in the menu bar → “Settings” → “General” → “Appearance” → “Colors and Fonts”. Now in the file explorer, for example, in the menu on the right, select "General", select "Text Font" and click the "Change" button.

Hope this solves the browsing issue with Eclipse.

About the problem of the Arabic name of the application, think about it, if you do the localization correctly, the Arabic name for the application will be displayed only when the user changes the language standard of the phone (and therefore the language) to Arabic, otherwise the default name for the English application will be displayed. So, just set the Arabic name in Arabic to string.xml and English in English, and you should be fine.

Answer 5

As for the part of the editor, there is no way to answer your question without knowing the platform. Windows should use a standard notepad.

For string mixing, this is a fairly common scenario. Typically, the application name will not be translated. In addition, sometimes you need to put some English description in brackets. You may have to play with strong direction marks in this case (otherwise, the brackets would look a bit strange).