App Localization: How To Prepare Your App For Global Audience

Major application stores (App Store and Google Play) are currently available in more than 150 countries with apps supporting over 50 languages. If your app concerns selling and buying real estate across the USA, presenting a nation-specific product line, local HORECA services, or corporate software for internal use, the language question is easy.

But if your app targets a selected a target user niche that's not limited to a particular country, you'll go global for market opportunities outside English-speaking areas. For brands it's building presence in various countries simultaneously, directly speaking to customers, paying attention to local holidays and culture. This works for both revenue opportunities and customer satisfaction.

You can and will identify target countries for distribution, locales and languages. You start with major regional languages and gradually add others. But you cannot tell in which country your app is going to become a hit with plenty of downloads and positive reviews streaming one by one. So what do you consider while aiming at many countries?

• Multilingual user-visible content is the tip of the iceberg that will engage your audience, be it the global sports fanbase, enthusiastic travelers or keepers of productivity. You can present your app differently to target users from different cultures: text, graphics, icons, audio and video. It involves minimum changes in source code, and all you have to do is provide the app with translations of high quality: either involve outside translators, or there may be skilled people in your software company to do the job.

• Translation of user interface elements. Actually, it's nothing your development team cannot handle: alert messages, functional buttons, app name if necessary – that's all pretty standard.

• Support for typographic features, fonts and special characters, and specific input methods (the simplest being the difference between right-to-left and left-to-right). Your app must accept input text in any language and in several languages at once, regardless of the UI language.

• Currency conversion and international payments. What's more, App Store and Google Play are divided into stores for different countries with different available apps, different rankings and reviews. The country-specific stores also concern post-release support of users in different time zones around the world – you'll have stats and user feedback from each store.

• Autocorrection dictionaries and keyboards for every covered language; locale-related issues (differences in formats for dates, times, lengths, weights, numbers and separators that vary, and other entities).

• Metadata at App Store / Google Play. Descriptions, keywords, screenshots: adjust your text for every country meticulously – no machine translation. People want to read descriptions in their native language without awkward feelings – and find out more about your app with ease and pleasure.

• When translating the content, always work with professional translators – machine translations harm the experience of your users. Even better if you can get a native speaker to review your texts – you don't have to meet one in person, it's easy to hire remotely. Beta testing in key regions can also help with it.

• Marketing for different regions is also essentially different, and promotional materials should be translated as well. You might try different approaches for different countries in both text and visual part.

Most of these issues are handled by your software development team. Developer tools, even standard ones, allow to easily avoid hand-tweaking and automatically adjust your product to various countries. The come professional translations and apps separately promoted on every local market. If you want a consultation as for your particular project, please contact us and we'll be glad to discuss it in detail.