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by lurking_swe 725 days ago
multi language support is pretty standard in many popular apps. it’s not even that hard.

Imagine supporting the most common language in the world. CRAZY right?

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/xcode/supporting-m...

4 comments

Surely not the most popular language among tourists in South Korea, who would be mostly from Japan, China, etc.
that’s a fair point. in that case, why not support chinese, japanese, etc?

my point is it seems like good business sense. strange they haven’t done this.

The subway station notification is spoken in Korean and English.
The common language most often used when people from Japan, China, or South Korea visit each other’s countries is English. All three groups of people are more likely to know English than either of the other two languages. The same can be said for the remaining group that doesn’t include people from those three countries.
Majority of tourists to Korea do not speak English. You’re really thinking from an American bias there.
> Imagine supporting the 2nd most popular language in the world. CRAZY right?

Why are you fixating on supporting the 2nd most popular language, shouldn't it support the 1st most popular language first? Or why not jump straight to the 3rd?

i meant most common, was an error on my part.

also, if you add internationalization support for 1 language in your app, it’s trivial (these days) to add other languages. My point is they should just add support for other languages, like chinese, japanese, english, etc.

More users = more money?

just so u know, kakaotalk does exist in multiple languages. feels like this whole thread is based on a false assumption

>Kakaotalk is in English, French, German, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Simplified Chinese, Spanish, Thai, Traditional Chinese, Turkish, Vietnamese (https://apps.apple.com/us/app/kakaotalk/id362057947)

Have you actually used it?

I used it earlier this year in Korea, although it did have a hard to get to setting to change your language, many many things were still in Korean.

It is very difficult to navigate, but I asked for help and a native was able to figure it out.

Still more usable than Google Maps though, which will only give you a not so good train schedule. No walking directions at all.

I've seen tons of American made apps from large companies that show bits of English here and there when switched to another language.

Localization is hard, even for companies that spend a lot of time and effort on it.

It isn't just string replacements!

  (X)  Positional *tracking* is brittle, equal battalions in range XNUMX it expenditure a time effort per batch on item. 
       Object is incorrectly threaded return request is here.

   [FINE] [Returns] [Add...]
>Still more usable than Google Maps though, which will only give you a not so good train schedule. No walking directions at all.

That's interesting, because Google Maps here in Japan is absolutely fantastic: train schedules are always correct (and updated with delays etc.), walking directions are good, etc. I guess having a big office here in Tokyo is a big part of this.

I think your talking about a different app, KakaoMap, which you're right isn't totally localised. KakaoTalk is though.
happy to be proven wrong! Cheers
> multi language support ... it’s not even that hard.

Can you elaborate on how easy it is, please? Say for a web application or a native Linux application?

The translating part is by far the hardest. But there are services to organize a crowd sourced translations of your app / service.

Booth android and iOS app building frameworks will try to force you into using variables for every rendered string (allowing you to change them easily and in one place - f.ex. based on user / device settings).