Android Translating To Arabic

Question

I am working with an Arabic translator who is translating my strings.xml from english to arabic. I realize that only Honeycomb or Cyanogen roms will support arabic rendering, but that is ok.

Our problem is that the text keeps getting flipped around. It seems that some text editors (like Eclipse) blatantly do not support right-to-left text. And in some cases, the text is not flipped character by character, but word by word, or parts of the sentence get rearranged ... when copying from Microsoft Word back into the UTF-8 xml file.

For example, the translator supplied lines with spaces on each end, and naturally I wanted to clean these up. But doing so flipped some of the text around!

For example:
إغلاق التطبيق
became:
التطبيقإغلاق
just by removing spaces around the edges.

Questions:
1. What editor should I be using?
2. Is it ok to mix english and Arabic on the same line (such as the App Name or other words that should not be translated) or is this fundamentally a no-no?

Answer 1

I am currently working on an Arabic/English project, and I speek both languages, so I can provide you with my experience :)

Answer to Question 1: Any editor that supports UTF8 will do. I am now using both eclipse and notepad++.

To setup eclipse with UTF8 (which is not the default for some reason), go to window menu -> preferences -> general -> workspace then change text file encoding from deault (cp1252) to other, and choose utf8, then restart eclipse.

For notepad++, ensure you install supported locales, including Arabic. It is not checked during instulation and you have to tick the checkbox to enable that feature.

Answer to Question 2: It is absolutely fine to mix Arabic and English words together in a sentence. A very very good article I found about that is written here http://www.w3.org/International/tutorials/bidi-xhtml/

This article describes design concepts for sites that support right-to-left languages (including Arabic and Hebrew), with emphasis on Arabic due to it being a more complex language because some letters get connected to others and some do not.

Even though this article is talking about website design, it has a good amount of how Arabic and English languages should be mixed.