Multilingual iApp in a difficult/special environment

2
votes

There are a great number of tutorials that tell you how to write multilingual apps for the iPhone. I haven't found one though that deals with my particular problem...

There must be a way how an iPhone app can enforce a certain default language if the user runs the iPhone with neither of the languages supported by the app?

Here in Switzerland we speak German, French and Italian (in different parts of the country). German can be considered the "default" language because its share is nearly 65%. Hence, any national retailer has his product descriptions in these three languages. We built an iApp that supports these three languages.

So far so good...as long as users have selected either of the three languages in their iPhone settings everything works as expected. For users that use the iPhone in English, that seems to be a significant number, this goes wrong because the application is displayed in French instead of German (the assumed default language).

Why? Because French by default is higher up in the list of available languages in the iPhone settings than German. The workaround for users is to switch the iPhone from English to German and back. The iPhone places German second in the list of available languages.

How should the app best deal with that? Ahh, of course we could support English for UI elements but our customer's product descriptions simply aren't available in English. Hence, this isn't really an option.

2
iphoneiosmultilingual
For the english localization (yes make one), use German names...or whatever you want your default to be. Enjoy. - jer
+1 well, that's a very eloquent description of your problem. It makes perfect sense. Yet I have no idea how one might solve it! - makdad

2 Answers

1
votes

I came up with the same problem some time ago. My way of solving it was to set all the localizable elements programmatically and not rely on the iOS localization at all. I implemented my own language manager that handles localized strings (read from a custom resource file) and tries to choose the best language for the current device (using the rules provided in a custom preference file). Of course, if the current preferred language of the device is available among the localizations, it has the highest priority. I also leave an opportunity to change the language in settings.

1
votes

You can let user choose which language to use in app and set it like this:

NSArray *lang = [NSArray arrayWithObjects:@"de", nil];
[[NSUserDefaults standardUserDefaults] setObject:lang forKey:@"AppleLanguages"];