At Netlog we believe in the importance of offering our users a personalised site in their native tongue. We've put a lot of effort in translations and localisation and want to provide our users that same experience when using OpenSocial apps.
To make this difficult process of localisation easier for OpenSocial developers, we are opening our translation capabilities to third-party developers. You write an application in one of the 23 languages we currently support and Netlog will do the translation for the other 22.

How does it work?

1. You write an OpenSocial app in your native language, with the localisation strings provided in a messages bundle.
2. You provide us the URL to your OpenSocial gadget specification.
3. We parse your spec and messages xml files and find the strings that need to be translated
4. Our team translates your app in > 22 other languages
5. We build message bundles for all of these languages
6. We inject these message bundles in your xml-spec

A code sample

A messages bundle

<messagebundle>
 <msg name="LOCALISATION_FTW">
 ${Subject.DisplayName} thinks ${Owner.DisplayName} has a funny accent!
 </msg>
</messagebundle>

Your OpenSocial gadget spec

...
<ModulePrefs title="ExampleApp">
 <Locale messages="http://www.example.com/messages.xml"/>
 <Locale lang="de" messages="http://www.example.com/messages-DE.xml"/>
</ModulePrefs>
...

Your OpenSocial gadget spec, with shiny new translations!

...
<ModulePrefs title="ExampleApp">
 <Locale messages="http://www.example.com/messages.xml"/>
 <Locale lang="de" messages=" ... /messages-DE.xml"/>
 <Locale lang="en" messages=" ... /messages-EN.xml"/>
 <Locale lang="fr" messages=" ... /messages-FR.xml"/>
 <Locale lang="es" messages=" ... /messages-ES.xml"/>
 ...
</ModulePrefs>
...

A better experience ...

This means that you'll have the ability to reach a localized audience in their native language, making it easier for you to create globally accessible applications that will help ensure success.

Read more ...

• Google API Docs: Gadges and Internationalization