Translate an iOS app into Simplified Chinese

What Simplified Chinese changes in an iOS interface

A Chinese string has two to three times fewer characters than its English source, but each character is roughly as wide as two Latin letters. The space it takes on screen therefore changes little. A button reading Save changes becomes 保存更改: four characters that fill much the same frame. Do not count on Chinese to free up room.

Three practical points:

• No spaces between words. A multi-line label can break between any two characters, and a long title truncated with … may lose its key term at the end.
• Full-width punctuation. Error: %@ becomes 错误：%@, questions end with ？, the ellipsis is …… and quotation marks are “ ”.
• Fonts. A Latin custom font bundled with your app has no Chinese glyphs. iOS falls back to a Chinese system font (PingFang SC), which can mix weights and heights when Latin and Chinese share one label.

Plurals, placeholders and word order

Chinese has a single CLDR plural category: other. In a String Catalog, your source language's one and other variations collapse into one form. %d photo / %d photos both become %d 张照片, whatever the number.

Chinese does, however, require a measure word between the number and the noun, and it depends on the object: 张 for a photo, 条 for a message (%d 条消息), 个 for many others. That is one more reason never to build a sentence by gluing a number to a separately translated word.

Word order often shifts. %1$@ liked %2$@'s photo becomes %1$@ 赞了 %2$@ 的照片; in other sentences the arguments swap places. If your source uses %@ twice without positions, switch to %1$@ and %2$@ before translation so the Chinese sentence can put each argument where the grammar needs it.

What Manuce returns, and what it does not do

Manuce supports Localizable.strings (UTF-8 or UTF-16) and the Xcode String Catalog .xcstrings. In a catalog, the target language is added, plural variations included. You get back the same file: indentation, key order, quotes, comments, line endings, encoding and BOM preserved; only the values change.

• The specifiers %@, %d and %1$@ are checked. Each translated value is compared with its source (placeholders, tags); if a mismatch persists, the source value is kept and the report says so.
• Not translated: keys, empty values, URLs, email addresses, numbers, colours, date formats, identifiers and anything marked as not translatable.
• The report lists the strings translated and those left as is, with the reason.

Manuce does not touch your project: it does not add the language in Xcode, change fonts or layout constraints, or test the interface. Traditional Chinese (Taiwan, Hong Kong) is a separate language, ordered on its own. Manuce does not provide sworn or certified translation either, which may matter for terms of use with legal weight.

Preparing your files

• Comment ambiguous strings. Share can be a button verb (分享) or a screen title. A short Chinese string with no context often has several plausible translations; file comments are preserved and act as context.
• Mark what must stay in Latin script. App name, plan names, brand terms: if they should not be translated, mark them as not translatable in the catalog.
• Keep dates and prices out of strings. Chinese writes dates as 2025年3月14日 and yuan with ¥: let DateFormatter and NumberFormatter produce them for the region and keep a plain %@ in the string.
• Decide on the form of address. The polite 您 suits banking or insurance, 你 a consumer app. The free sample shows the register used before you pay.
• Include permission prompts. Camera or location usage texts often live in a separate InfoPlist.xcstrings: upload it too, or those dialogs will stay in the source language.

Checking in Xcode and on device

With a .strings file, place the translated version in the zh-Hans.lproj folder; with a catalog, check that the language appears under the code your project expects (zh-Hans for Simplified Chinese, not zh-Hant). Then run the app with language set to Chinese and region set to mainland China.

• Go through the densest screens: tab bars, alerts, list cells. Look for line breaks splitting a two-character term, and for truncation.
• Increase the text size (Dynamic Type): characters squeezed to fit become unreadable sooner than letters do.
• Check labels mixing Latin and Chinese, such as Wi-Fi 已连接, for font consistency.
• Review the strings the report kept in the source language and fix any malformed specifier in the source.

In practice

1. Switch multiple arguments to positional form (%1$@, %2$@) and comment ambiguous strings.
2. Upload Localizable.strings or the .xcstrings catalog, choose Simplified Chinese and read the free sample.
3. Download the translated file and the report of strings left unchanged.
4. Put the file back in zh-Hans.lproj or the project, then test with Chinese language and region.