Seventeen languages, service alerts included

Sydney talks in a lot of languages, and so do the people visiting it. Shoo. speaks 17: English, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Arabic, Vietnamese, Korean, Japanese, Hindi, Nepali, Thai, Indonesian, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, French, German, Italian and Greek. The list came from a simple rule: English, plus the main languages of people who live in or visit Sydney.

Most of the work wasn’t the translating itself. It was making every screen still work once the words changed.

Your language, chosen in the app

You pick the language inside Shoo., during onboarding or later in Settings, whatever your iPhone itself is set to. It changes straight away. Arabic turns the whole layout round to read right to left. Your widgets and the Lock Screen follow the same choice.

Dates and times follow the language you chose, as it’s written in Australia, but always with Western digits. That way a departure time lines up with route numbers like T1 and 380 on the same board, whatever the script around them.

In the list, each language is written in its own script, with its English name underneath, so anyone can find their way back.

Every label on one row

Every word in the app is written in the code with its English beside it. A script gathers them into one file, 1,135 strings at the moment, and each language has its own file with the same keys. Before a translation reaches the app, the script checks that placeholders such as the time or the stop name are still there, and that every plural form is filled in. Arabic needs six of them. Chinese, Japanese and Korean need just one.

Translators work from a short brief. A few of its rules:

• One row per label. Buttons, chips and list rows have to fit one row of a phone screen, so a translation should run no more than about a third longer than the English, and shorter in languages like Chinese or Thai.
• Apple’s words for Apple’s things. Lock Screen, Settings and Restore Purchases read the way iOS already says them in your language.
• Names stay put. Opal, Transport for NSW, line codes, station and street names stay in English. Landmarks are the exception: the Opera House gets the name people who speak your language actually use.
• No em dashes, in any language. A comma, a colon or a full stop instead.

Even the name has rules. Shoo. keeps its full stop in every language, and in Korean the particle that follows it is chosen by how “shoo” sounds.

Service alerts, translated on your iPhone

Transport for NSW writes its service notices in English. If your app language is something else and iOS can translate it on your iPhone, Shoo. translates each notice there with Apple’s translation, once per notice and language, and keeps the result. Where iOS can’t translate your language, notices stay in English. Every place that notice appears reads the same translation: the stop board, your trip, the service status page.

While a translation is on its way you see the English, and on the service status page you can always tap Show original. For notices that appear on their own, Shoo. only uses languages already on your iPhone, so a banner never interrupts you with a download prompt. When you open a notice yourself, iOS may offer to download your language.