As the international markets for mobile apps continue to grow, it’s important to market your apps to users around the world by localizing your apps. Just as mentioned in our previous blog post, the top charts of many countries are dominated by apps that offer local language support, indicating that many international markets have a strong preference for local language.

Currently, Google Play allows you to add localized store listings (app descriptions) for 51 languages easily via Android Developers Console. Localizing the Store Listing is a great way to test your international markets before committing your full resources to localize the whole app right from the start...

We are glad to announce that we recently added our 45th language to our language combinations for our professional translation services!

The newly added language is Latvian, which is spoken by approximately 79% of the population of Latvia (source: wikipedia) and is among one of the 51 languages that Google Play supports.

With the addition of Latvian, clients can now order professional translation services for 45 languages on OneSky.

Languages supported by OneSky professional translation services

• Afrikaans
• Arabic
• Bengali
• Catalan
• Chinese (Simplified)
• Chinese (Traditional – Taiwan)
• Chinese (Traditional – Hong Kong)
• Czech
• Danish
• Dutch
• English
• Estonian
• Finnish
• French (Canada)
• French (France)
• German
• Greek
• Hebrew
• Hindi
• Hungarian
• Indonesian
• Italian
• Japanese
• Kannada
• Korean
• Latvian
• Lithuanian
• Malay

Through iTunes Connect, you can add localized metadata, keywords, and screenshots in different languages in order to aid discovery and to reach more international users.

For exmaple, if you have uploaded localized metadata, keywords and screenshots in German, the users who have set their iOS language to German would see your text and images in German. This also applies to all the German-speaking stores on the “Rights and Pricing” page that you selected.  And the users in those German-speaking stores would be able to discover your app by searching the localized keywords that you have provided.

Localizing the app description is also a good way to test the water if you do not want to commit full resources to translate the whole app right at the beginning...

In April, Amazon announced that its Appstore would expand internationally to support nearly 200 countries and developers can submit their apps for distribution in these countries to reach millions more active Amazon customers. And it looks like Amazon has begun this expansion in China already. You can visit Amazon’s China Appstore here.

If you would like to distribute apps on the Amazon Appstore, simply sign up by visting the Amazon Mobile App Distribution Portal.

Wondering what apps are already utilizing the Amazon’s China Appstore and what apps are popular there? App Annie, a mobile app analytics company, has recently added China to their Store Stats ranking for Amazon. There, you would be able to view the top free apps and top paid apps for China on the Amazon’s Appstore.

Translating ...

Ensuring consistency in your translations is important. Having different translations for the same term at different places on your websites or in your mobile apps might not only confuse users, but might also make your apps or websites look unprofessional.

One way to ensure consistency is to set a glossary for your project. Another easier way  is to use the same translator to handle all the translations for the same project. This way, not only the choice of words could be kept consistent, the tone and style of your translations would be more consistent as well.

Historically, OneSky would often try to allocate jobs from the same client to the same translator for consistency purpose...

The localization process generally consists of 5 stages and there are uesful tips that you can follow at each of the below stages to facilitate your localization process.

1. Pre-localization
2. Coding for localization
3. Layout design
4. Finding the right tool
5. Translate

1. Pre-localization – Make sure your codes support localization at the very beginning

It would be a nightmare if you have to tidy up your codes to support localization after your startup has been running for months. Why not simply make sure your codes support localization at the very beginning? It would only take you very little extra effort.

We recommend that you should use those commonly used formats / frameworks for your platforms, e.g. i18n for Ruby on Rails, String resources for iOS...

Historically, only admins would have the rights to download the translations of the projects. But with our recent update, admins can control whether their collaborators would have the right to download translations as well.

For example, if you are using OneSky to crowdsource the translation of an open source project, you might want to grant your collaborators the right to download translations for their own use.

To change this setting, go to your “platform settings“.

Under “Privacy”,  you can change the access right for downloading translations.

• If you set this to “private”, your collaborators would not have the right to download translations.
• If you set this to “public”, your collaborators would have the right to download translations.

We’re constantly working hard to imp...

According to the data released by Flurry, China has overtook the U.S. to become the top smart device market (in terms of the number of active iOS and Android smart device, including both smartphones and tablets) in the world.

In January 2013, the no. of active iOS & Android smart devices were roughly the same in China (221 million) and the U.S. (222 million). But with the much faster growth rate in China, Flurry estimated that China would surpass the U.S. by the end of February 2013.

Flurry also commented that they believe China will continue to take the lead due to the huge difference in population for the two countries (China population is over 1.3 billion while the U.S. population is only over 310 million).

The below chart also shows that the U.S...

With the goal of offering comprehensive solutions to support a full range of localization projects, OneSky is constantly adding support for more file formats to cater for your different translation needs.

And recently, we have added support for general document translation, including Word (.doc, .docx), PDF, Powerpoint (.ppt) files, etc.

Historically, OneSky started out by specializing in apps and websites translation. To get translated, developers simply need to upload their resource files (.strings, .xml, .po, .yaml, etc.) and our system will parse the files automatically to extract the text needed to be translated. When the translation is completed, developers can download it in ready-to-use resource file format as well.

But with our growing client base, we hope that other than offerin...

One common question that many developers or marketers face when they first consider about translation is “what languages should I translate my product into?”.

To answer the above question, other than simply conducting your own market research like competitor analysis, why don’t you try to engage your users and let them tell you what languages they would like to see your product be translated into?

In this article, we will introduce a free tool that allows you to create a poll for users to vote for language preferences easily.

OneSky TranslateDot – a free tool to let your users vote for language preferences

To invite your users to vote for what translations they’d like to see for your product, you can utilize the free tool, TranslateDot, developed by OneSky to create a poll easily...