Question

I need to create an iPhone/Mac app that is in a non-English language only. What’s the right way to do this? The app’s name even has some non-English (unicode) characters in it. I can separate the problem into three specific questions:

1. How should I deal with the fact that my app’s name is, say, “Déclaration”? I know I should probably not name my project Déclaration.xcodeproj from the start (e.g. because that makes output from git on the Terminal look painful). How should I set up my project?

2. How should I deal with NSStrings in my code? Should I just write things like NSString *labelTitle = @"Bienvenue à la déclaration!"; without any hesitation? I know that a more proper way would be to use localization techniques, but isn’t that too much pain, given that I only need the foreign language? It seems rather fishy having to make the whole app in English, even if I don’t need it.

3. Are there any other things I should take into consideration, when writing a non-English only app?

Answer 1

1. Don’t worry about the Git output. Mac filenames have been Unicode for a very long time now. Git is using UTF-8 but it’s cautious about printing out non-ASCII characters so it escapes them. You can still do things like this:

   git init
   git add Déclaration.xcodeproj
   

   You can turn the escaping off using the core.quotepath setting:

   git config core.quotepath false
   

2. Yes, you do not need to hesitate. You can always localize later, using strings in your native language as the starting point.

3. Yes, in the Info.plist change the “Localization native development region” to the language you are using instead of English.