How to quickly localize your app for 300 dollars

http://blog.discofingers.com/blog/2014/10/18/app-store-optimization-how-to-localize-your-app-for-300-dollars

by mrborgen • 12 years ago

37 50 12 years ago

blog.discofingers.com

paaldevibe• 12 years ago

How about South Korean?

mrborgen16• 12 years ago

I haven't tried it to be honest, as I have so little knowledge about that market.

But as David Janner says in the article linked to below, he did't get a lot of result from it. But if anybody knows any good translators to south korean, I'd be happy to include it in the article.

http://makeappmag.com/iphone-app-localization-keywords/

keehun• 12 years ago

I am an South Korean iOS developer in college (well, now, "Korean American"). I am willing to take some translating work. As an intern, my best work was with Code 42, the makers of CrashPlan.

blondiebeer• 12 years ago

Sceptical towards the quality of so cheap translation services, but i it all comes down to budget. I guess it is possible to do some QA before launching.

mrborgen16• 12 years ago

I understand. It's really important to do a lot of Q&A, but that's precicely what we have done with these people.

And personally, I dont need people with masters degrees to translate for me. I'd much rather have people with good marketing skills/understanding and a solid language.

Vulkum• 12 years ago

This might be a stupid idea, but maybe use pairs of translator to get the text translated forwards and then backwards to the original language, and compare how much of the message has been lost? I think this way you can also get a hint of how that native person would interpret the translated message.

mrborgen16• 12 years ago

That's not a bad idea actually. This will reveal their quality quite a lot. However, it will be difficult to know which of the translators fault it is if the message gets lost..

coob2• 12 years ago

I really hope it's not a stupid idea, because that's how we translate our product :) - http://utalk.com

We have a web app that two translators use initially independently to translate our entire corpus. The app then asks them to select the best option where there are mismatches (they can also enter a third alternative). There are a couple of rounds of this.

Finally an editor has access to all rounds of the translation in an editable table (http://i.imgur.com/zPJp0sz.png) where they can see who has inputted what, and wether things have been marked as 'acceptable' or 'completely wrong'.

This works well on most of our short/simple strings.

It also helps that we have two voice actors who are also native speakers come in and record the script, where any further errors or better translations can come up.

We do this because we're translating with different goals than the majority of translation purposes. We need to focus on translating for speech at relatively low volume and for those learning a non-native language. Most translation shops focus on written language for native speakers, high volume, speed and cost.

iansampaio• 12 years ago

The majority of the population in Brazil won't say a word in english, so they would rather use a not so good app in portuguese than one in english... the refinement can come later as it grows in that market (and hopefully some users' feedback)

mrborgen16• 12 years ago

Do you know wether people from Portugal react negatively on brazilian portuguese? I have sticked to brazilian portuguese, as we get much more downlads from Portugal than Brazil.

Couto• 12 years ago

short answer: yes.

long answer: Most Portuguese users under 30 years old can read and write, at least, basic english, and would prefer to use the english version of your app instead of brazilian portuguese. This is the scenario that I experience with people around me, at least.

People who are not so comfortable with english will _endure_ the brazilian portuguese if you provide no alternative.

rsendv• 12 years ago

Why not automate this and remove the human factor? Google probably has an API for Translate.

mrborgen16• 12 years ago

I highly doubt it. At least for the screenshots. People will get very sceptcal if they see grammatical errors in their native language.

What I do think can be automated though, is the act of finding search phrase equivalents for different languages.

And if you have some humour or poetic fomulations in your description, it probably wont give you a very good result.

dturnbull• 12 years ago

Don't overestimate automated translation. My girlfriend is a native Japanese speaker (and professional translator) and she laughs when she sees the results of Google Translate. Especially for a language like Japanese, nothing's going to beat a human being who takes pride in their work.

mrborgen16• 12 years ago

Agree! I got really surprise when I tried to translate to my native language via Google Translate. It made me realise how crappy their translation really is.. :P

aikah• 12 years ago

But with a collaborative effort and machine learning,you can make a translator learn the subtilities of a language.The situation in 10 years regarding automated translation will be quite different from today.This is true with a number of "impossible tasks to automate" today.

xorcist4• 12 years ago

My native language is a germanic one, Swedish, which is globally speaking pretty much as close to the English family as it gets. I know for a fact that Google Translate butchers it completely and it's sometimes hard to even understand the results. I can only imagine what it would do to Japanese or Chinese, which are much, much farther from English.

If you want a hint of what Google Translate does to a language, do it full circle. Translate a text from English to for example French, and then input the result for translation back to English. The resulting experience is pretty close to what the French user would get.

(It also doubles as comedy.)

melling3• 12 years ago

I'm not a fan of machine translation. Gosh, it's hot, I need a fan.

Then you've got all sorts of idiomatic expressions. It's often not as simple as plugging into Google. I've been working on iOS language apps for a few years. They are localized in a dozen languages. It's a lot of work. For example:

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/h4-spanish-lite/id388918463?...

Is there any interest in maintaining an open source list of common words and expressions? GitHub? Google Spreadsheet? I could seed it with some of my data. I already have some common words for a dozen languages here:

http://thespanishsite.com

mrborgen16• 12 years ago

I think an open source list of common words and expressions is a very good idea. Ideally, that kind of tool also plugs into Google's Adwords tool, so you'll get the amount of searches each expression gets.

edpichler2• 12 years ago

We can't do that. Localizing is more than translating.

xorcist4• 12 years ago

So instead of serving a useful description to your prospective customers, you think it's a good idea to serve translated words in random order, which the intended recipient may eventually work out the meaning of?

I can only speak for myself, but there is a special place in hell for any and every one who butchers my native language into an indecipherable mess and have the guts to serve it back to me.

gambiting• 12 years ago

Because Google Translate is absolutely horrible? You can kind of understand what it's trying to do, but most of the time it's not something you would put nowhere near a professional product.

realusername• 12 years ago

The quality automated translation is not really there yet and Google translate won't have the context of your app anyway.

There is also lots of other small details on how people are going to use your app. For example in some countries, the last name is supposed to be put before the first name and if you put it the other way around, you would still have ~15/20% of people which would put their last name on the first field anyway regardless how it's labeled.

Gys• 12 years ago

Localizing your app's metadata (keywords, description and screenshots) is the easiest way to increase your downloads, and should be done as soon as you have optimised your keywords. David Janner managed to 7x his downloads by localizing his app.

Very interesting. Maybe anybody has figures like this on translated meta-data of 'ordinary' websites ? I mean not in particular for any downloads, but for the impact on the number of website visitors.

mrborgen16• 12 years ago

Those kind of figures would be very interesting, indeed.

Google will most definitely crawl all your localised pages, so you'll at least get more local traffic.

Dont have any numbers though..

edpichler2• 12 years ago

I've localized my apps exactly the way the post is and it's not so easy. Localizing is necessary and inevitable, but it's not so cheap as this article are saying. There are another costs the article are completely ignoring.

If you do iterative and lean development, localizing using freelancers website will really slow down your release cycle. This multiplies your fixed costs you spent running your small company.

Another point, you'll also need to pay others skilled translators to verify the quality o the localization.

In my case, after localizing it, the numbers of user increase just a few. If I would spent this money on marketing and development, I'm sure that I could get better results.

lpsz2• 12 years ago

I've had fairly good luck with [1] for iPhone apps on my very low budget. For decent enough quality, the translator has to be familiar enough with the context (e.g. someone who had translated apps, uses apps, and most importantly understands what your app's features/demographics are.) Work with your translator to give them enough background information. Just translating a word like "music" in isolation may lead to subpar results.

[1] http://www.icanlocalize.com

mrborgen16• 12 years ago

Agreed! It's important to get them to understand how your app works. Ideally they should download your app, read comments, blog posts, everything that relates to it.

It will make it cheaper and better.

Interesting website. Do you get to communicate directly with the translators?

mrborgen16• 12 years ago

What kind of app have you localized?

The increased downloads will allways be relative to the downloads you have in that spesific market before the localization.

It is true that you'll have to spend time doing it, which translates into money. However, I claim that you can do it using only three hours, plus the time it will take you to adjust the screenshots (it will normally be a design job in addition to just changing the text.)

These translators are good at their job. IMHO you won't need to double check their work with other translators.

"If you do iterative and lean development, localizing using freelancers website will really slow down your release cycle."

How come? Because it's freelancers you have reached through a website?

hackerboos• 12 years ago

I think the worst thing is when the support requests start arriving in [insert language here] and you cannot reply to them.

Localising like this might get you more downloads in a foreign market but you are potentially burning bridges with customers because you cannot give them the support you give your english speaking customers.

easyname• 12 years ago

wow, yesterday I was taking about localization with my friend. I could not convince him to do it immediately. Now it should be easy. Thanks.

Will update with the data once done.

mrborgen16• 12 years ago

Go for it!

obviouslygreen• 12 years ago

"Localize your app" is a serious overstatement for what's covered by this article. To actually localize an app, automation is not an option, nor is just getting your keywords and descriptions done.

If your target audience is international but you can reasonably expect them to speak your language but to search in their native tongue, OK, this makes sense. But that's a large target for a small segment.

Localization is a process that involves your translator understanding your product, the terms it uses, the context in which it uses them, and how those terms can be transitioned into their target language. That's a far cry from keywords and descriptions, and it matters in many cases. Those cases never stop at $300.

It's often worth doing (this is totally dependent on your goals, though) but in the case that it's worth doing for you, it's also worth deciding whether you want to actually do it or whether just making sure people find your app is OK or whether you want them to be able to use it in their native language. Huge difference.

mrborgen16• 12 years ago

True enough, if you want to fully localize your app, you'd have to spend much more money and time.

However, I'd definitely not recommend people translating their entire apps without localizing it's metadata first to check your apps potential in various markets.

For a lot of apps, including our music making app, it's meaningful to reach out wide even though the language within the app is english, as it's not a very text based app.

The result will give us a good overview over which languages that has the most potential, which we later on can consider to localize fully for.

mercer• 12 years ago

Speaking of localization, this article is a fascinating look into the complexities of localizing the game "Papers, please": http://dukope.tumblr.com/post/83177288060/localizing-papers-...

mrborgen16• 12 years ago

A very interesting article indeed. Thanks for sharing :)

aardshark• 12 years ago

That seems like a small amount of money for 8 languages. Translation is usually priced on a per-word basis, so I would guess you were translating about 300-400 words?

How did you vet the translators that you found? Like you said, there are lots of poor translators out there (and even professional translators make mistakes). Without having a second translator review the translation, how can you be so confident that no mistakes were made?

nimblegorilla• 12 years ago

how can you be so confident that no mistakes were made?

You can be 100% confident mistakes were made.

This method is useful for apps that don't care as much about quality.

mrborgen16• 12 years ago

Here is how we tested them:

Language skills: I made an Odesk job for each language and got quite a few applications. THe first filering process consists of deleting those who have below 4,5 stars, and thos who have't worked at Odesk for quite a while. Ideally 1000+ hours.

The I sent a sample to the most promising candidates. These samples were all sent to professional translator, who picked their winners.

Marketing skills: I asked every single translator how they would research keywords in their local language. Their answers will easily give you an overview of how reflected they are in this field. Plus, I only chose people who had done similar tasks before. Not everybody had done app localisations, but at least localisations for web marketing purposes.

I can't be 100% sure that there are NO errors in the translations. But I can be 100% sure that this localisation will benefit my business, as it will increase downloads and revenue significantly. I know this from previous experience.

xorcist4• 12 years ago

Unless you actually offer your application, and support it, in a particular language, "optimizing your conversions" from the app store by putting up lots of translated keywords amounts to spam.

Sure, you may earn money from it, but it's not really helpful to your customers.

mrborgen16• 12 years ago

Completely disagree. Let's take our app as an example, it's an music making app with just a few sentences in it, which aren't really relevant for the core experience.

If a russian person searches for делать музыку (make music), why is it spam that our app is there?

xorcist4• 12 years ago

Of course there are exceptions to this. Yours may very well be one. If there is very little or no text in it that does not matter for using the software, a bad translation would be nothing worse than a nuisance to the user.

rada• 12 years ago

I think there is a major disconnect for you as an English speaker. Try picturing the situation in reverse - you go to the app store, search for "music making app" and click on result after result only to see a bunch of Chinese characters, or words that make no sense because they weren't translated by a human. I guarantee you will feel spammed, rather than: These words are not relevant to my "core experience"! I'll just deduce that "Toys" actually means "Play"!

Case in point: I am that "russian person". When I search in Russian, I am doing it because I want to get russian apps - that is, fully localized apps whose UI is natively Russian. I positively hate it that the app store is full of apps that were "search optimized" like you suggest.

guard-of-terra• 12 years ago

It is also a good idea to provide language selector, not just always use OS default language. Especially if you put some human effort into translation. Some people use English system language because many translations are sub-optimal.

transpy• 12 years ago

This is a common misconception of translation: the idea that you just need to "flip" words from language A to language B and you're done. This is quite naïve. In professional translation circles we talk about transcreation and localization. When you need to sell an English speaking book in a different country, you can't just convert the books' text strings from language A to language B. You need to RECREATE the book in the second language. There is one rule in quality publishing: the reader SHOULDN'T feel that what he/she is reading is a translation. The reading must feel natural. IT prose, on the other hand, is comparatively poor and is indeed subject to automation. It's a matter of quality. If you just want to "feel" that you are already "present" in the global market just because you did a cheap text conversion, a couple of dollars will do the job. If you really want to CREATE a product with different, same-quality versions for several cultures/languages/markets, you definitely need better informed strategy.

How to quickly localize your app for 300 dollars

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