The Only App Localization Tutorial You Will Ever Need

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The Only App Localization Tutorial You Will Ever Need Return On Investment Even with app localization tools and automated processes, producing different language versions of an app takes time and effort for developers, product managers, and marketers alike. It also requires funds for the translations, advertising (possibly), and ongoing maintenance. Return on investment is typically a concern. Marketers must provide sales estimates, while developers and translators must evaluate the workload. The product manager then compares returns against costs to decide if a localization is viable. There is no standard order of app localization either. App product teams must evaluate their app on its own merits and international sales potential. Yesterday’s stock choices of localizing phraseapp.com | sales@phraseapp.com | +49-40-357-187-76 | twitter.com/phraseapp | facebook.com/phraseapp | linkedin.com/company/phraseapp
The Only App Localization Tutorial You Will Ever Need into French, German, Italian, Japanese, and Spanish may no longer work. China and Brazil may offer higher potential revenues now. Also, it may make no commercial sense to localize for very small or very competitive markets. The Risks Of Unsuitable Cost Reduction Cost-cutting to try to shoehorn a localization into a budget is a delicate matter. There may be cases where reuse of localization effort is possible. For example, much of the French language in France and in Canada is the same. In general, everything a user sees or experiences with an app should be available in that user’s native language. Mixing languages (local and default) in a user interface often makes users doubt the overall quality of the app. Similarly, skimping on the quality of translations and on checks after localization are recipes for localized app market failure. Internationalization And Localization What many people loosely refer to as localization is in fact two activities: internationalization and then localization. ● Internationalization of an app is the preparatory work to separate text and other user-facing content from the code of the app. The goal is to make the app itself language-independent. Hardcoded content is replaced by calls that automatically retrieve the text in the language of the user running the app. Language-dependent formatting is handled in the same way. Functions are used to automatically format numbers, dates, and quantities, and display them correctly in each localized version. The internationalization of an app makes it considerably easier to estimate the amount of translation work needed to produce a localized version. Therefore, it also helps see which localizations are likely to give a better return on investment. ● Localization involves the translation of the separated content into a given language, like Spanish or Korean. Ideally, developers will do the internationalization (“i18n” for short) of their app just once for several different individual language localizations (“l10n”) afterwards. Some people refer to “transcreation” rather than translation, indicating that phraseapp.com | sales@phraseapp.com | +49-40-357-187-76 | twitter.com/phraseapp | facebook.com/phraseapp | linkedin.com/company/phraseapp
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The Only App Localization Tutorial You Will Ever Need

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