I have an idea to let users translate my application to their own languages.
I imagine this in this way:
If application is not translated to user’s system language, English version of UI is displayed and user is asked for help in translation (it’s obvious)
Next, user is asked for translate some phrases from English to his mother tongue. And asked to check some others translations. (it’s a bit of work, but nothing sophisticated)
Hard part of my idea is:
User presses “update translation” and text resources for this application are update to latest editions.
Of course it’s possible to make frequent updates, but this approach has some disadvantages:
1. I have to make all of those updates frequently, and not all of users will be happy with it.
2 Even if updates will be done weekly, time from make effort to get results will be too long form most of users, and probably, response will be not as good as it can be.
Have you any idea how to load translations “on-line”?
Android currently doesn’t support this. To accomplish what you want, you’d need to insert your own resource handling code to return strings everywhere they are used in your UI. This means you couldn’t let the framework load strings itself (for example no use of android:text=”@string/something” in your layouts), and calling your own function to retrieve a string that wraps Resources.getString()/getText().
And you’ll also need to deal with the fact that resource IDs are not stable and can change with every build of your app.
So you are looking at something quite non-trivial.