Multilingual Implementation Using Xamarin.Forms

Introduction

In this tutorial, we will learn how to implement Multilingual in Xamarin.Forms without using external plugins or platform wise implementation with dependency service. The latest Xamarin forms offers .net standard to implement multilingual. So without further delay, we will skip into the coding part of the article.

Steps

I have split the coding part into 4 steps as in the following.

Step 1 - Creating new Xamarin.Forms Projects.

Step 2 - Creating App Resource files for multi-language.

Step 3 - Language Management

Step 4 - Implementation of Multilingual.

Step 1 - Creating new Xamarin.Forms Projects

Create a new project by selecting New Project. Select Xamarin Cross Platform App and click OK.
Then Select Android, iOS and UWP Platforms as shown below with Project template as "Blank" and Click OK.

Step 2 - Creating App Resource files for multiple languages

Add one resource file as base file with the name as your preferred name. In my case, I kept the name of the file as “AppResources.resx” and it will be used as default language file.
Then add one resource file for each language you want to support. We must follow a specific naming convention for each file as the base resources file followed by a period (.) and then the language code.
For Example

Language

Language Code

File Name

Tamil

ta

AppResources.ta.resx

French

fr

AppResources.fr.resx

Then add resources with the same name with language specific values in each resource files as in the below screenshot.

Step 3 - Language Management

In this step, we will see how to handle multilingual for Xamarin.Forms.

Get Device Language

CultureInfo.InstalledUICulture

Get or Set the actual language

CultureInfo language = new CultureInfo("ta");
Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentUICulture = language;
AppResources.Culture = language;

Step 4 - Implementation of Multi-Lingual

Open your designer file and add the resources as shown in the below code snippet.
1. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
2. <ContentPage xmlns="http://xamarin.com/schemas/2014/forms"
3. xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2009/xaml"
4. xmlns:resource="clr-namespace:MultilingualXFSample.Resources"
5. x:Class="MultilingualXFSample.MainPage">
6. <Label Text="{x:Static resource:AppResources.WelcomeText}"
7. FontSize="Large"/>
8. </ContentPage>

By default, the app will take the base resource file. By passing the language code it will take the language specific resource file and we can set the language as shown in the below code snippet in runtime.
1. CultureInfo language = new CultureInfo("ta");
2. Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentUICulture = language;
3. AppResources.Culture = language;
4. Application.Current.MainPage = new NavigationPage(new MainPage());

Output

Default - English	Tamil	French

Download Code

You can download the code from GitHub. If you have doubts, feel free to post a comment. If you like this article and it is useful to you, do like, share the article & star the repository on GitHub.

Language	Language Code	File Name
Tamil	ta	AppResources.ta.resx
French	fr	AppResources.fr.resx