When phones began to control our lives app for localization, the trading platform changed significantly. For example, Google Play is multilingual today, which is a significant development opportunity app for localization.
You can target all regions and enter all markets. But it is better to do it carefully, without rushing. Many startups make a shared mistake: they consider translating their applications instead of localizing them.
Unfortunately, in most cases, such projects fail in new markets due to the audience’s lack of understanding of the product. That is why a large company or companies with a lot of experience choose one of the game localization services. In the end, you save much more than you spend!
In this article, you will study the main features of app for localization, so if you are interested, stay tuned!
1. Study the Localization Guide for Android Developers.
When you develop your application, Android automatically downloads the most suitable resource. These can be texts, images, sounds, or other statistical data. The same system works for the device locale. And if there are no locale-specific resources, the default value will be used in these cases. Android developers recommend moving all strings to strings.xml and not encoding them.
This will make the localization process easier. Also, if you have parts, phrases, or words that should not be translated, you can do so using the <xliff:g> tag app for localization. But try not to make more strings than you need, as this will only have the opposite effect and worsen the user experience. And, of course, it never hurts to double-check that everything works correctly and all processes look precisely as you imagined app for localization.
2. Choose markets app for localization
First, you need to analyze the target audience and the new markets you will enter, as this will set the direction for the entire project, and all other choices will be made based on it. It will help if you choose which markets you need and what languages you must use there. To save money, you can start with different localization levels and select the one that is most suitable for the product.
There are cases when translating an app is not necessary because people prefer the English version and only translate sections of the game and some parts of the text, or in some countries, people stick to essential localization, for example, when they need to translate Play Market information, app description, keywords, and screenshots.
3. Start testing app for localization
When choosing target languages and markets, identify what needs to be contained (images, audio files, time, numbers, dates, currency, etc.). Don’t forget to think about the design itself. As you know, the length and height of words varies in different languages;
For example, if you compare English, dominated by short words, and German or Russian, where words are almost twice as long, or Chinese, which has tall hieroglyphs, you will see that the design needs to be corrected. Try to develop a flexible design from the beginning.
Develop a glossary; You can include certain words, names, and phrases that you want to keep or translate in a certain way. It is important to cover more markets in the future so that even if the localization team changes, the translation is consistent.
4. Conclude and decide what to do next
Now, it is time to evaluate the results. Choose the most valued criteria for your business, see if the localization meets your expectations, and decide what to do next. Here, you can see if all markets were booming and
whether you want to emphasize some of them or pause some app for localization.
In addition, you will need to consider whether you need complete localization if you did not have it from the
beginning, as this can help you increase your app’s retention rate. This means that the audience will continue to use your product repeatedly.
Final consideration
After reading about the most important steps to localize an Android app, you will notice that it is important to think about this before developing it app for localization.
Small details need to be taken into account from the first letter of the code because you will have to change something a long time later app for localization.