How to translate apps on iOS and Android, and is it worth it financially?

Question

I was wondering, how do you put up a translated version on the market for your app (both Android and iPhone)? Do you have to make a separate app for each language or is there a way to put multiple languages in the same app so that if they are in a country that speaks Spanish for example it would download that version?

Also has anyone tried translating their popular apps? Was it worth it on sales?

Answer 1

The localization system in Android is actually extremely elegant. I can't say that such a process is without cost, but it's definitely a process that has gotten cheaper over time.

If you have an Android application, chances are that already all your strings for your default language are already externalized and placed in a locale-specific folder.

Then if you can get your own customers to volunteer to do the translations, and if you're willing to do the work publicly on a web site, the entire process can technically be done for free (I say "technically" because nothing is truly free when working a project even when others are donating their time).

You'd use the following Eclipse plugin to do the importing from Android with: http://getlocalization.github.io/eclipse/

Your volunteers would use this web site's interface:

Your developers would use this built-in Android tool to make sure all the different localized text and different fonts would still display ok within the same buttons and the same layouts.

And you'd still need to do some local user testing on real local devices for the countries/languages that have the biggest markets you're targeting, but that too, can easily be done cheaply if you offer the job on some Crowdsourcing/Mechanical Turks web sites located in those countries, or ask your own customers.

As to the revenues you should expect from other markets outside the US, that depends on the nature of your application and the nature of your market, but don't expect very much, except for a huge bump in downloads, don't expect very much at all in terms of revenue. The number of downloads you'll get just won't translate into sales.

The respect for IP laws in countries like China or Russia is nil. Plus on Google Wallet, it can be impossible to buy an application from a number of countries without a US-issued credit card.

In my case, I've had good luck with Japan, but the decision to localize in Japanese didn't actually take any guess work on our part. There was plenty of evidence that paying Japanese customers were already using our application, so localizing it for them, and with their help and guidance, was an absolute no-brainer for us.

Answer 2

On iOS (not sure about Android), your app assets folder contains subfolders for localised versions of all your text, images, xml etc. The iPhone then decides which assets folder to load at run time based on the locale settings of the phone.

Like everything else, whether it is worth doing depends on the app and your target audience. An app containing complex written instructions probably won't do well in countries that don't speak the language, but most people in most countries speak at least passable English, so for apps that are fairly intuitive and don't have much text (e.g. a game like Angry Birds) there may not be much point localising it.

Of course if you make Angry Birds then you can afford to have it localised anyway!

Answer 3

There might not be an immediate benefit to having multiple localized versions of your applications but it feels inevitable that localized applications will have more earning potential. (I've heard rumors that China's iPhone market may outsell the US iPhone market this year. Ignore the other six billion people on Earth if you wish...)

In practice, you provide a single application with multiple localizations baked right in. Details on how you internationalize your application varies from platform to platform, so I suggest reading the Apple internationalization guidelines or the Android internationalization guidelines.