Recommendations For Translating An App In Arabic
Solution 1:
Checkout the HTML dir attribute: http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/struct/dirlang.html
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"dir="rtl" xml:lang="ar" lang="ar" >
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=utf-8" />
</head>
<body>
...
</body>
</html>
Solution 2:
You can start from the dir attribute. But it's not enough if you want a complete mirrored interface, because "dir" only deals with the text-direction.
What you need is a clean semantic markup in your HTML template with the styles separated in CSS stylesheets, so you can easily link your HTML template to an LTR or RTL style sheet according to the current langauge.
Solution 3:
From my experience of overseeing Arabic translation localization projects, you might want to consider two major options:
1) Make the app really internationalized 2) Make a separate one just for Arabic
I imagine you'd probably like to avoid the second option. When it comes to making the app as international as possible, you really need to think from a cultural perspective. I'll try and give as many details as I can:
Iconography You already know you need to flip lots of icons for RTL languages, but don't overlook the fact the icons might not be that international anyway e.g. using the post office icon for mail
Numbers and dates There's actually different numbers and ways of writing dates in Arabic. Instead of hardcoding this, get it to use the system's numbers/dates.
Culture and Colours I don't know what your app does, but check out how appropriate images and colour are before you start. For example, if your logo is a dog, that isn't going to go down well in Arabic cultures, where dogs are seen as evil animals. Green is often seen as an erudite colour in the west or representing nature, but in Arabic cultures it's the colour of peace and harmony.
Parsing strings When you come to building your strings, it's very easy to think one sentence one string. That's not the case. Break the sentence down into the smallest parts you possibly can. For example:
There's a blue house on the hill --> There's | a blue house | on the hill
"a blue house" is better together than three separate strings because in languages like Arabic the word 'blue' and even 'a' can change form depending on the grammatical structure of the sentence.
Commenting When you're preparing your strings for translation, make use of comments for the translator. You don't need to comment everything but it's useful to give context to things that might be immediately obvious e.g. "Print" does this mean the action 'to print' or is it a physical print?
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