Article in How we build

Lessons from internationalizing Trello, part I: plurals on iOS

On page 52 of my copy of K&R, in a discussion of the ?: operator, is this line of code: printf(“You have %d item%s.n”, n, n==1 ? “” : “s”); And thus began my decades-long proliferation of plural-unfriendly strings. I would later learn that not all languages base pluralization on whether the relevant number is one or not. […]

Article in How we build

Lessons from internationalizing Trello, part II: designing for translators

When coding i18n support in an iOS app, you need to know technical things like how to use Localizable.strings files and NSLocalizedString(). And when designing the UI, you need to understand right-to-left interfaces and remember that any element with text can vary in width considerably. But one thing I didn’t anticipate was how important the translation files were […]