
How to quickly localize your app for 300 dollars - mrborgen
http://blog.discofingers.com/blog/2014/10/18/app-store-optimization-how-to-localize-your-app-for-300-dollars
======
obviouslygreen
"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.

~~~
mrborgen
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.

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edpichler
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.

~~~
mrborgen
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?

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xorcist
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.

~~~
mrborgen
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?

~~~
rada
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.

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transpy
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.

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mercer
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-...](http://dukope.tumblr.com/post/83177288060/localizing-papers-
please-papers-please-was)

~~~
mrborgen
A very interesting article indeed. Thanks for sharing :)

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Gys
> 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.

~~~
mrborgen
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..

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aardshark
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?

~~~
mrborgen
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.

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iansampaio
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)

~~~
mrborgen
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
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.

------
guard-of-terra
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.

------
blondiebeer
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.

~~~
Vulkum
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.

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

~~~
mrborgen
Nice, that tool looks like something more startups could use when translating
their products. Have you built it yourself?

~~~
coob
Yep, very much hacked together, but it works well for us.

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

~~~
dturnbull
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.

~~~
xorcist
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.)

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easyname
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.

~~~
mrborgen
Go for it!

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paaldevibe
How about South Korean?

~~~
mrborgen
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/](http://makeappmag.com/iphone-app-localization-keywords/)

~~~
keehun
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.

