AkVox. Your App in Your User's Language.

To localize your Xcode project you must create a Strings Catalog. To do this go to File > New > File from template… Type string in the filter entry at the top right hand side. Double click String Catalog, accept the name Xcode suggests and click create. Don’t navigate away from where Xcode wants to store the file. You will see a new file called “Localizable.xcstrings” has appeared at the top of Xcode’s Project Navigator. It will be empty. Every time you build your project, Xcode locates all strings that will be presented to the user and copies them to Localizable.xcstrings. Build your project to see these strings.

At the bottom left of the Localizable.xcstrings window, click on the plus sign. This will show you a list of the most popular spoken languages you can choose. At the bottom of this list is “More Languages”. Click on this to see many more languages and their variants. However, do not be too liberal with choosing languages and variants. AkVox employs Google Cloud Translate API and although Google can translate into around 200 languages, it cannot translate into anywhere near the many hundreds of language variants presented by Xcode.

For example, if you click on English in the More Languages list, you’ll see over 130 possible variants of English. However, Google Cloud Translate has only one entry for English with no variants.
Click here to see the list of Google Cloud Translate Languages.

If you really need to translate your app into languages not supported by Google, you’ll need to seek the services of a professional translator.

With popular languages such as Arabic, Spanish and French, try to go for the standard language rather than any of the variants. Even if Google supports the variants you want, it is probably unlikely that there will be any difference in the translations required for your app.

After selecting all your languages, build your app as normal. When you build your app, Xcode examines the sources and extracts all strings which will be presented to the user. It adds these strings to the “Localizable.xcstrings” catalog.

Select Export Localizations…” in the Product menu making a note of where you saved the export folder. Start AkVox. You can delete any previous project by clicking the X in the red box in the upper right hand corner of the Home screen.

Drag the exported localizations folder, not the individual .xcloc files, into AkVox. You’ll be presented with a screen of cards, one for each language. In the top right hand corner of the screen, click “Translate”. AkVox shows you the progress of each language’s translation with a set of blue, green and purple bars.

Note, the free version, only translates with a simulator, it doesn’t use Google Cloud Translate. The simulator only “translates” your texts into jumbled versions of Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” speech. You can see these after translating in AkVox’s Review screen.

For AkVox to perform real translations, it needs to connect to Google Cloud Translate. For this to occur it needs an API key. To Get a key you need to create or use your Google Cloud account. From there, you again, create or use an existing project. To that project you add Cloud Translation API.

If you stumble across pricing plans and see figures such as $20+ or $30+ per hour that that make you blanche in horror, do not worry. These prices are for more advanced translation services. AkVox uses the most basic translation service, v2. The price for this service can be found here

You’ll see Google allows you to translate 500,000 characters a month for free. This is a large amount of free translation. In the months while AkVox was being written and tested, not once did we receive an invoice from Google for more than £0.00.

AkVox tells you how many characters are going to be used for a translation at the top of the screen before you click translate, thus allowing you to keep a record of how much of your free allowance you’re using. The number of characters is calculated as the number of untranslated characters (excluding spaces) in your project’s language (E.G. English) multiplied by the number of languages you are going to be translating into.

Besides obtaining a Google Translate API key, to use Google, you will need to pay to use the full version of AkVox. The payments can be for a week, a month, six months or a year. The payments are one-offs and will not repeat. If you don’t pay, you can still use AkVox for as long as you like, you will not be nagged to pay and there is no time limit for free usage. You can pay on the Shop page.

Compare the low prices of AkVox to those translation services that also use Google Translate, but fail to mention that fact, and don’t require an API key. You may like to enquire of those companies, why, if you are only translating 100,000 characters, are they charging such ludicrous amounts of money? Also how many of these services provide the facility to drag and drop Xcode Localizations folders or Android strings resources files?

Lastly, how many of these services provide the translation assistance you need when publishing your app to Apple’s App Store or Google’s Play Store? I suspect the answer is none, unlike AkVox as you’ll see later.

When the translation is complete, click on Export on the left menu then click the Export button on the top right. This will package all your language catalogs into a single folder ready to be imported into Xcode. That is the minimum amount of AkVox involvement necessary to translate your app once you have paid for the full version of AkVox.

After you’ve run translate you’ll need to import the localizations catalogs back into Xcode. Alas, you cannot import the folder as a whole, you have to import the catalogs one-by-one. Here’s how. Go to the location you asked AkVox to export your translations, or click the blue folder icon next to the Export button on AkVox’s Export page – if you cannot see a blue folder icon, run export again.

Return to Xcode and go to Product > Import Localizations… Take the dialog box to where the translations are exported to, then click on the first .xcloc localizations catalog and click Import. If you get a warning about Missing Resource file, you can safely ignore it. The resource file it is referring to is connected to images and colours in the Assets.xcassets catalog. Import the remaining .xcloc files.

AkVox continues to assist you once you app is ready for publication. Alas, it cannot help you translate the Previews and Screenshots you’ll use to illustrate your app’s capabilities, but AkVox can translate the texts need you need to complete.

The Outlet pages in AkVox lets you enter the Promotional Text, Description, Keywords and any additional text you decide to add. AkVox can then translate these into your app’s languages. When you are ready to fill each Promotional Text etc entry on each language’s page, AkVox provides a convenient set of buttons allowing you to easily move between languages and copy each block of text as needed. Thus making the task of promoting your app in multiple languages less of a pain that it otherwise would be without the assistance of AkVox.

Similarly, when you come to fill in the texts necessary when creating subscriptions, AkVox provides what we call “Mini Texts” you’ll name and use to create the entries and descriptions for each subscription type.

Besides the purely practical services provided by AkVox, you can also review and hear your app’s translations Click Review on the menu on the left. You’’ be presented with a list of languages of your app. If Apple text to speech is available for a language, you will also see the name of the voice that will be used to speak the translated text.

To see all a language’s original texts and its translations, click on the left hand chevron of any language. Here you’ll be presented with all the original and translated texts. The blur wording at the top of each block is the comment created by you or the system for that particular string of text. The number on the left in a square is the line number of the text in the original xliff file. Next you’ll see the original text and below that its translation. On the right if you see a an icon of a wave and a person, click on this to hear the translation spoken. Click on the green keyboard icon to edit the translation manually. Click the blue language name at the top of the screen to close the texts.

Next to the voice name, you may see red badge and a number above the wave/person icon. The badge number indicates how many different voices are available to speech a language. If the language has no badge, this means there is only one voice available for that language. To change the voice, click on the name. A dialog box will appear with all the named voices available for this language. To hear a sample of a voice, click on the wave/person icon. To select a voice to speak the translations, click on the voice name.

You may notice some names have one or two stars next to them. This indicates the voice is enhanced, if it has one star or a premium voice if it has two . To download extra voices for your Mac go to Apple icon > System Settings > Accessibility. Scroll to near the bottom and click the chevron on the right of “Live Speech” in the “Speech” section. Click on the i in a circle on the far right of the Voice line. You will be presented with a list of all the voices available for your system’s language, each being or standard, Enhanced or Premium quality. Click the blue cloud next to the voice to download it. Close and restart AkVox to pick up any downloaded voice.