Show HN: Mobile Application Localization Database

1 point

13 years ago

tl;dr Looking to crowd-source a word and expression localization database with Google Spreadsheets and Github.

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I'm trying to create a public domain database of common words and expressions that developers can use in their mobile applications. In a few years, several billion people are going to have smartphones and most won't speak English.

I've been writing iOS language learning software myself (http://www.h4labs.com), so I realize that translation and localization are huge pain, being both costly and time consuming.

Creating a database, and building a better process, should help app developers reach a much larger audience. I'm trying to get people to contribute to the database. Even if it's simply a matter of taking your current localization files and adding them to the sheet, I'll sort through the data for duplicates.

I have a Google Spreadsheet:

    https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0ArVkFagUZg7bdHB0MTNuMDJySGpnazFpWVZMVUVVNmc&usp=sharing

, which is probably the easiest way to gather the initial data. However, using Github, especially since they support formatted csv's/tsv's

    https://help.github.com/articles/rendering-csv-and-tsv-data

...might be better in the long run.

Here's what the data looks like on Github:

    https://github.com/melling/AppDB/blob/master/tbls/AppLocalization.tsv

I've created a MySql table so I can check for duplicates and try to build some supporting scripts.

    https://github.com/melling/app-localization-dictionary/blob/master/mysql/tbl/app_localization_dictionary.tbl

Here are the initial languages that I put in the spreadsheet:

arabic

bengali

chinese

chinese_traditional

czech

danish

dutch

farsi

finnish

french

german

greek

hebrew

hindi

hungarian

indonesian

italian

japanese

javanese /* Not japanese */

korean

norwegian

polish

portuguese

portuguese_br

russian

spanish

swedish

thai

turkish

vietnamese