Translating your app is crucial to success. To maximize your revenue, you should go global to attract more customers. In this article, I will show you some free and paid methods to localize your web or mobile application.
Benefits of localized application:
Reach more audiences
Why would you limit your marketing strategy to your home country if you can become international? According to Internet World Stats, the countries with the highest number of Internet users are China, India, the United States, Brazil and Indonesia.
| # | Country | Total English speakers |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | China | 6,43% |
| 2 | India | 12,18% |
| 3 | US | 95,46% |
| 4 | Brazil | 5% |
| 5 | Indonesia | 62% |
| 6 | Japan | 18% |
| 7 | Nigeria | 56,72% |
| 8 | Russia | 5,48% |
| 9 | Bangladesh | 18% |
| 10 | Mexico | 11,6% |
As you can see, translating your application into several languages can significantly increase the number of users you can reach.
Get more engagements and gain credibility
Localized web pages and mobile applications get much more traffic and feedback. Translation shows respect for the local market: its language and its culture. Your users will trust you more and will be more loyal. Besides, it will show your serious intentions about your project, which can put you ahead of your competitors.
Search Engine, App Store and Google Play Optimization
Translating your title, description, metadata and keywords will help you better position your app or web page in foreign markets. It will increase the visibility and the user's count.
Services that will help you translate your application
DeepL – automatic machine translation
It is the most accurate artificial intelligence translation service available today. DeepL has the best results compared to its competitors: google Translate, Microsoft Translate, Facebook. DeepL works best with long posts that contain multiple sentences as it is able to extract the context from your message. Translating a word or a single phrase correctly may be more difficult. Available languages: English, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Dutch, Polish, Russian. DeepL is free and fast. It knows well the essential grammatical rules. However, the quality of the translation can sometimes be unpredictable and must therefore be proofread.
Reverso Context - contextual dictionary
Reverso Context takes examples of texts already translated to translate your word. The text examples are drawn from different sources, which makes it possible to cover the multiple meanings of a word. This service is free of charge and there are 14 languages available. Reverso Context is a dictionary so it is perfect if you want to translate a single word, but it will not work if your goal is to translate sentences.
OneSky - localisation platform & translation service
With OneSky, all you need to do is uploading your strings file, then choose the translation you need. Your text will be translated manually by professional translators. There are 50 languages available. If you want to translate an ordinary web page or a mobile application, it will cost you about $120 - $140 to translate 1000 words. If you want to translate more complex games (with background and cultural stories) the price may vary. OneSky provides translation files fully prepared for deployment, which means you do not need to copy your translation in a key: value form. It is already done for you.
POEditor - localization management platform
POEditor is a service that helps you to translate your application in a team. First, you need to upload your strings file, then add contributors who will translate your application / website / game. When all the translations are ready, you can download them in the right format and easily integrate them into your project. Where can you find contributors? The most common way is to ask your community in your social networks or your users. You can also order a professional manual translation provided by Gengo. POEditor is free for 1000 strings, then you have to pay according to the number of strings you have to translate. For manual translation, Gengo invoices separately. For 1000 words it can be from 70$ to 140$ depending on the language pair and the complexity of the text.
Fiverr is a freelance services marketplace where you can order your translations. For 1000 words you will pay about $42. The price depends on the number of words, the language pair and the translator's reputation.
How do we translate our web pages and applications?
I speak natively Russian and Maxence speaks French, so if we need these languages to be on our application, we do the translation by ourselves. To do the English translation, we use DeepL. As our level of English is quite good, we are able to check the machine translation, sometimes using the context dictionary - Reverso Context. If we don't need to translate our application immediately and it can wait, we ask our users for help and manage it in POEditor. If a translation is necessary, we pay people on Fiverr. When have more money, we will certainly use OneSky.
That's it. In this article, I covered 5 completely different ways to translate your application. Depending on your needs and resources, you can choose the one that suits you best or combine all of them, like we do.
