Ping from Morocco

I don't usually blog about work-related problems I encounter, but I figured this could be useful for some people. Below is a checklist of potential issues than can crop up when trying to introduce localization to an application that initially supported a single language. Backend error messages Instead of returning error messages, it would be more suitable to return error codes, and have the Android application display their interpretation in the user's language of choice. For example, instead of returning a string that says "This username is already in use", return something like "duplicate_username". One caveat of this approach is how the context that comes with errors should be handled. In the previous example, when a username is already in use, it's customary to return similar usernames that are available. The backend and the frontend should agree on a way to pass this contextual data through the response. Alternatively, you can propagate th...