Published: November 3, 2022
7 min read
In this article, you'll learn:
1
👍 Reasons to localize your app
2
🛠 Main approaches to implementing localization
3
⚙️ Implementation with Google Sheets, React Native, and i18n
4
💡 Takeaways
With each year, the number of people using mobile and web apps is rising. Because of this, there’s an increasing need for app content translated into different languages to reach as many people as possible.
This article will review some of the non-trivial reasons for localizing an app, several tools and approaches to it, and offer an easy solution for React Native using Google Sheets.
While the most obvious reason for translating the app content into different languages is to reach new audiences, reasons to localize your app are not limited just to this. Moreover, there are some benefits of app localization even if you’re using only 1 language within the application:
In some of our recent projects, we started using Google Sheets for localization — take a look at our Norsk Guardian project, which is a React Native app for checking the status of BLE-integrated batteries. To make this possible, we developed a library called [google-sheets-localization-helpers]{target=_blank rel="nofollow noopener"}, which you can also use in your own projects.
Now, we’re going to outline the main steps to implement localization with Google Sheets & React/React Native.
First of all, we need to create the spreadsheet itself, and get an API key in Google Console for that account (to get the key follow these steps). Let’s set up the following sheet structure with three languages and one tag column (will be used in the code):
For more information on how to change the languages, as well as to get the language of the user device, please refer to react-i18next documentation.
Now, let’s summarize some of the main ideas of the article:
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