The Only App Localization Tutorial You Will Ever Need

​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