Question

I know when you know in advance your product will be used in these specific countries, then people should go for resource bundle approach. But when we are not for in how many countries our product may be launched in future at present, then why not go for translation api like provided by Google? Say if we plan to launch our product in a new country, then in resource bundle approach you have to make the entries for each label in text file. But with this translation approach, we can do make the files through translation apis at the start of server so that we can save rune time translation. Though I have not seen any project doing this as of now. Any thoughts on this?

Answer 1

One major reason not to use automatic translation is quality – you don’t want to only “translate” your app, you really want to “localize” it.

And even if you just want to translate it, you want the result to have some meaning, which requires context – otherwise, you’ll end up with menus/UI elements that have such weird texts the users will think your system is so crappy they’ll stop using the translated version or worse, the system as a whole.