Google just doesn’t sell phones in every country like Samsung or Apple. For example, Google’s upcoming Pixel 5a 5G has only been confirmed in the United States and Japan. There is always an option to import Pixel phones, and Google does a good job of ensuring that its software is readable in most languages.
But what about third-party services? In the Chrome browser, you can use the built-in translation tool to translate web pages into your native language, but for Android applications, this is currently not possible. This may change with a new feature in Android 12, and there is some evidence that it will be available on Pixel phones.
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Previously is was reported by XDADevelopers that Google was developing a new framework in Android 12 to convert the UI of the application into the user’s native language. After the first Android 12 Beta was released on Google I/O 2021, Google updated the API difference report using the new android.view.translation package and related methods in the View class that matched the methods were discovered last month.
However, these new APIs are not documented, which means that we can only make educated guesses based on their intended use. In the blog, the developer CommonsWare confirmed our explanation of the new feature, which aims to provide “the translation of user-visible strings provided by the system.” As he pointed out if this feature is mandatory, it may pose a challenge to developers, but there is no doubt that it will make applications with limited language support easier for users to use.
However, application user interface translation will not be a standard feature of Android 12, because its support will depend on the “translation service” defined by the system. This translation service is defined by the config_defaultTranslationService value in the framework, and as the developer kdrag0n pointed out to us, this value is actually defined in Android 12 Beta 1 of Pixel phones.
Specifically, config_defaultTranslationService is set to: com.google.android.as/com.google.android.apps.miphone.aiai.translate.services.TranslationService, where “com.google.android.as” is the software for device personalization services Package name, “com.google.android.apps.miphone.aiai.translate.services.TranslationService” is the name of the translation service provided by the application.
The current version of the Device Personalization Services application does not actually have this service, so we cannot actually test the new UI conversion feature of Android 12 on Pixel phones. After the device personalization service is updated, we should be able to finally test this new feature.
Since Google uses a runtime resource overlay (RRO) called “PixelConfigOverlayCommon” to set the value of config_defaultTranslationService, we currently believe that this feature will not be limited to specific Pixel phones once it is released.
If Google intends to restrict access to specific Pixel devices, they may have defined values in one or more PixelConfigOverlay APKs included in one or more Pixel devices (for example, PixelConfigOverlay2019 for Pixel 4 and later). However, we will not be sure until the feature is released, and it is likely to wait until the Pixel 6 series is launched later this fall.
