

Translations – Applications Marketing 101 - hristiank
http://appicurious.com/2011/10/21/translations-applications-marketing-101/

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mootothemax
Great article. One thing to bear in mind with translating your apps is that
it's a complex field, and you want to do it right the first time around.

For an example of possible pain, you can't simply pass a string such as
_Welcome, Thomas, you have {number_of_messages} messages_ to your translator
and expect all to be OK. I speak a bit of Polish, and in this instance, the
word _messages_ will take one of three forms, depending on whether it's 1
message, the number of messages ends in 2, 3 or 4 (but isn't 12, 13 or 14),
and another form for everything else.

The gettext library is works really well for handling pain points like these,
and the "About" section in its manual gives some common examples like the
above:
[http://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/gettext.html#gett...](http://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/gettext.html#gettext)

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mpessas
Gettext has most of the features needed, when translating software, like
plurals, comments by developers and translators and fuzzy strings. There are
projects that even use it for documentation purposes, like fedora.

Another good format for i18n is the TS format used by QT
(<http://doc.qt.nokia.com/stable/linguist-ts-file-format.html>).

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ridruejo
One thing to consider is that the users will expect support in that language
as well. This may be much less of an issue for a game or mobile app, but much
more for a SaaS offering for example.

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hristiank
As always I would love to hear the community thoughts on my article. Also if
you have experience in this particular topic please do share.

Cheers

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aw3c2
Please do not editoralise titles like that. "Increasing your app
downloads/usage" is pure spammy linkbait.

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hristiank
I'm sorry... I fixed it to reflect the actual title. I didn't mean for it to
be spammy.

