Over the last couple of months, we've noticed a little bit of confusion about how language support works in the Meridian Editor and in our Meridian-powered apps. I hope to clear up a little bit of that confusion.
When we say that we support a language, like Spanish, we mean that if a user has their device language set to Spanish, they will see Spanish content in their Meridian-powered app if, and only if, Spanish translations have been added for the English-language content in the Editor.
When thinking about languages in Meridian-powered apps, it's important to think of them as discrete buckets of content. If I have my device's language set to Spanish, I won't be able to use English-language search terms for my searches. Likewise, if my device's language is set to English, I won't be able to search using Spanish terms.
This can get confusing, sometimes, because there's nothing stopping me from entering Spanish content into the Editor directly. However, if I did add Spanish words to the Editor directly, I would only be able to search for those Spanish words if my device were set to English. Any text that you enter into the Editor directly is treated as English by the Editor.
There is only one way to add non-English language content to the Editor and that is through importing a translation file to the Editor. (We provide translations for non-customizable text in the app.) We recommend that you add all of your content to the Editor as English and then export the translation .po file from the Editor for the language you'd like to add translations. Once you've done so, you can use a program like PO Edit (http://poedit.net) to add your translations to that file. Then you can import that translation file to the Editor and your users will be able to see your translated content on their devices.
We have some documentation on the Editor's language localization process here:
http://docs.meridianapps.com/article/323-language-localization
If you have any questions about languages, the Editor, and our Meridian-powered apps, I'm happy to answer them.
Shawn Kilburn
Meridian Technical Writer
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