As soon as we had discovered that RAB offers the option to change the app GUI to the local language, we sat down with the team and searched and made words for “home”, “search”, “settings”, “about”. This was not trivial, because those are some abstract concepts. But since people are now using several apps, they were exited to have apps where their own language was not just “the content” but also being used for the GUI.
This might be obvious to other users, but today I discovered the option to export local translations from DAB and RAB.
Since we have different team members working on RAB and me working in DAB, my first attempts to import did not work. Finally I found that it was a case of Linux-like “please be careful about capitalisation”. The team had seen language codes like “en”, “fr” and “de” but still they had entered “ABC” in their RAB project.
I appreciate that in the family of tools DAB, RAB and SAB a lot of the data is accessible and tweakable. So I could just look into those exported files and firstly see: “yes, there is hope for an import; those fields have similar names”. And then I figured out the capitalisation detail. So I am sharing here, as notes to self, and possibly helping other users.
The import as such looked a bit worrying: screen turned all black and the app builder was not fully responsive for a long while. A re-start of DAB fixed all that, and now I am happy that “we are speaking with one mouth”, i.e. all our apps are using the same expressions for “home”, “settings”, etc. so that our users can learn those new words.
Those details (the ability to export and import across projects) are only saving a few minutes per project, but they speak of experience and consideration in the developer team. And they avoid mistakes and make for more consistent output. Thank you guys.