How we used a Glide app to translate all other Glide apps in two days
To build an amazing house, you need more than builders. You’d likely want an interior designer, a painter, a landscaper, and a lawyer to handle zoning and insurance, among others.
To build an amazing app, you need more than programmers. You might want a designer to layout the interface, an artist to make icons and graphics, a marketer to promote your app, a lawyer to review terms and privacy policies, etc. You might also want a team of translators to translate your app into different languages for users around the world.
In other words, apps are more than code, and creating an amazing app requires specialized knowledge in many areas. At Glide, our goal is to make it easy & fun for anyone to create amazing apps without code. To accomplish this, we have to make the other essential aspects of app development — design, distribution, security, communicating with users, legal compliance— easy & fun as well. It’s a broad challenge that amounts to much more than removing programming from the equation.
Two subtle and often neglected aspects of app creation are accessibility and internationalization — ensuring that as many people as possible can use your app by accounting for differences in ability, culture, and language. We’re looking forward to making these aspects easy & fun as well, and today we’re taking a small step in that direction by translating Glide apps into Spanish, Italian, French, Japanese, Yoruba, Chinese, and more. In other words, if you’ve built a Glide app, it automatically just got slightly better in Latin America, Spain, Italy, France, Japan, Nigeria, and China!
Your entire app is not translated, just its ‘chrome’ — back buttons, login, sharing, and other standard flows. We accomplished this with… a Glide app! We built a private app for amateur translators in our community, and they provided translations for five languages in the first two days.
The app uses screenshots to show translators the relevant context before they provide a translation. Here’s the spreadsheet connected to the app, showing Japanese translations:
We may apply a similar technique for translating entire apps in the future, where each app can be translated by its users, if the app developer allows it.
We hope you enjoyed this clever use of Glide to translate itself! Please email mark@glideapps.com if you’d like to help translate Glide into more languages.
