Translate an Android app into English

What changes when strings.xml goes into English

English is usually shorter than Romance languages such as French (around 10 to 15% shorter), so buttons and tabs tend to gain room. The real traps lie elsewhere.

• Apostrophes. English UI text is full of them: Don’t show again, You’re offline, Can’t connect. An unescaped straight apostrophe in strings.xml breaks the resource build. Manuce writes Don\\'t show again, as Android expects.
• Punctuation. No space before colons or question marks: a French Erreur : %1$s becomes Error: %1$s. Angle quotes or German low quotes become English quotation marks.
• Capitalisation. Account settings or Account Settings? Pick one convention and check it holds across menus, dialogs and notifications.
• Formality. English has no tu/vous or du/Sie split: both registers end up as Check your connection.

Plurals: one, other and the zero trap

English has only two CLDR plural categories, one and other. Manuce writes the quantities the target language requires:

<item quantity=\"one\">%d file deleted</item>
<item quantity=\"other\">%d files deleted</item>

If your source is Polish, Russian or Czech, its few and many forms collapse into these two. If it is French, watch zero: French puts 0 in one, English puts it in other, so the output reads “0 files deleted”.

• Android only uses quantity=\"zero\" for languages that have that category; in English it is ignored. For “No files”, use a separate string and test the 0 case in code.
• Pass the count twice to getQuantityString when the string contains %d: once to pick the form, once to fill the placeholder.

British or American English: choosing the folder

Android separates variants by folder: res/values-en for English in general, res/values-en-rGB or res/values-en-rUS for a specific region. Strings missing from a regional folder fall back to values-en.

Differences are mostly spelling: Colour/Color, Cancelled/Canceled, Licence/License (noun), Personalise/Personalize. A practical set-up is a complete values-en in the spelling of your main market, plus a small regional file holding only the strings that differ.

Keep date formats out of your strings: 03/04 is 3 April in the UK and 4 March in the US. Let DateFormat follow the device locale. Manuce does not translate date formats found in the file.

What Manuce returns, and what it does not do

You get the same file in the same format: indentation, key order, quotes, comments, line endings, encoding and BOM preserved. Only the values change. string, string-array and plurals are handled.

• translatable=\"false\" is respected, so app_name or an API key marked that way stays as it is.
• Not translated: keys, empty values, URLs, email addresses, numbers, colours, date formats, identifiers.
• Each translated value is checked against the source: %1$s, %2$d or a <b> tag must survive. If a mismatch persists, the source value is kept and the report says so.

Manuce only translates what the uploaded file contains: text hard-coded in layouts or in Kotlin or Java code, your Google Play listing and text inside images are outside it. The price is based on the words in the values, with keys and tags excluded.

Preparing the file and checking the result

Before uploading:

• Run the lint check HardcodedText and move any labels left in layouts into strings.xml.
• Mark translatable=\"false\" on anything that must not change: brand names, URL schemes, technical values.
• Replace concatenated strings (\"Hello \" + name) with a single string and a placeholder (Hello %1$s), so word order can follow English grammar.

After delivery:

• Place the file in res/values-en/strings.xml, build, then run lint MissingTranslation.
• Read the report: every string kept in the source language is listed with the reason.
• Switch a device to English and test plurals with 0, 1 and 2, plus screens with tight buttons.

In practice

1. Gather all interface text into res/values/strings.xml and mark non-translatable values.
2. Upload the file to Manuce, check the quote and the free English sample.
3. Download the translated strings.xml and its report from your client area.
4. Put it in res/values-en, build, and test the app on a device set to English.