Language packs: Meta’s mobile localization solution
May 9, 2022Lu Su
Summary
This post details the development of a custom mobile localization infrastructure at Meta, featuring downloadable language packs and the FBT (Facebook Translation) framework. It addresses challenges with native Android/iOS localization by supporting gendered text and reducing app size. The post explains the end-to-end flow, construction of language packs, FBT string creation with extraction and structure, and the client-side adoption of language packs, including improvements for poor network conditions like prefetching and fallback mechanisms.
More from the Internationalization and Language Modeling trail
- Integrating autoconversion: Facebook’s path from Zawgyi to Unicode
- Expanding automatic machine translation to more languages
- Scaling neural machine translation to bigger data sets with faster training and inference
- Under the hood: Multilingual embeddings
- Transitioning entirely to neural machine translation