Building for a multilingual world
summary
Global device share is 90% outside native-English countries and multilingual populations are rising (a quarter of India, two thirds of working adults in Europe, US multilinguals up ~200% in 40 years). Recommendations include organizing resources with language/script/region qualifiers like values-zh and zh-Hant (Android 7 adds script support and resources do not fall back across scripts), declaring supported locales to avoid 89 unexpected configurations, using ICU MessageFormat with equals one for plurals, and enabling per-app language prefs on Android 13 (LinkedIn delegates to Settings; Google Maps syncs via runtime APIs).
AI-written summary · about
chapters (5)
- 0:00Introduction
- 1:12Organize your app resources
- 3:25Define resource configurations
- 6:45Use message format
- 9:48Per app language preferences
related talks
15mGoing global: building for a multilingual world
27mTexts, dates, numbers, currencies, plurals, etc. App internationalization guide
33mFearless Localization and Internationalization Across the Nations
38mTricky Backwards-Compatible Localization
52mAndroid Internationalization: How to Design an App at Global Scale
41mBuilding Android Apps for a Global Audience
48mTips for Multilingual Support in 17 Countries
10mAndroid app internationalization: users can now choose their application language
