iPhone: Localization

Should have done my research before trying to do my own localization on the phone... the full article can be found here. Here are the basic steps to localizing your iphone application. Trust me, this is the way to do it...

Step 1: Create 2 directories called en.lproj (English) and it.lproj (Italian)

Step 2: Add new string file by going to File -> New File -> Other -> Strings File, name the file as "Localizable.strings" and place it in en.lproj.

Step 3: Repeat step 2, this time saving "Localizable.strings" inside it.lproj.

Step 4: Add the following lines to the strings files...

"WelcomeKey" = "Welcome!!!"; // put into english version
"WelcomeKey" = "Benvenuto!!!"; // put into italian version

Step 5: To grab WelcomeKey you just do: NSLocalizedString(@"WelcomeKey", @"") like so:

NSLog(@"Welcome Text: %@", NSLocalizedString(@"WelcomeKey", @""));

That's all there is to it... Here are some of Apple's conventional language codes:

English: en
Japanese: ja
French: fr
Deutsch: de
Netherlands: nl
Italian: it
Spanish: es
Portugues: pt
Korean: ko
Simplified Chinese: zh-Hans
Traditional Chinese: zh-Hant

The full list can be accessed through the following call:

NSArray *languages = [defaults objectForKey:@"AppleLanguages"];
// print each NSString in languages