Localization — Not just English and not just the United States
There were two prime initiatives Juice Box Monkey Designs wanted to start tackling in 2022. The first was accessibility, read all about it here and the second was localization. Both were first supported in our app Chance Rope the new support came out in the summer. However it wasn’t easy, this is our experience.
There are two pieces you need to consider when supporting localization in an app, the language and the country. We knew going it that being the first attempt at localization so we should set our bar sorta low, with a goal of at least 5 languages.
Now how do you choose which language and country? We took two approaches for the first localized support
- The biggest market has the biggest opportunity
- The biggest area of support
Based on our investigations we landed on supporting British English (due to the fact Chance Rope uses measurement values throughout the game), French, German, Italian and Spanish.
Fun fact English is not the only language, nor is there only one of them 😔
Getting Translations
We are a small business so we needed to find a relatively cheap solution for the localization of our app. Knowing only English with no different lines to people who speak other languages we had to look for a third party to handle this. Since it was our first attempt at getting translations we tried a couple different services to get the job done.
Service 1: Localize Direct — Our Top Choice 🏆
- Pro: Great turnaround with 2–3 days for 100+ items to translate
- Pro: The translator asked several questions about context to properly translate
- Pro: Price per word was the lowest we found while investigating different service offers
- Con: Minimum translation cost of 40 dollars, not great if you need only a handful of words translated.
Service 2: OneSky
- Pro: Super quick turnaround
- Need to Know: There is a different translation cost per word for games versus other apps
- Con: Priciest option per word we tried
Service 3: Google Translate
- Pro: Open-sourced and easily accessible
- Pro: Easy for quick keyword (one-word) translations
- Con: Doesn’t always translate the context of sentences
Country Support
The number of countries largely increased based on supporting British English, French, German, Italian and Spanish. Expanding Chance Rope to five continents and now available in 46 countries.
Edge cases for Chance Rope and Countries
- When you download Chance Rope in the United States, the default measurement is feet because of the imperial system there.
- Metric system countries have the default measurement as metres, metres spelt the British English based on localized translations.
Handling Updates
Similar to how accessibility is not required but it's nice to support. Allowing you to open your app to even more people, localization does this as well. Once you get a handle on how all the pieces work together and how to support them, handling updates or supporting more apps with it will be second nature. You start to consider how this will work with localization while you work on the app.
The burden of updating content or adding new sections of apps with localized information does add an influx of commitments when considering an update. My biggest suggestion is to document exactly how you did updates for localization so that you can easily reference back to it when you come to it. Make sure you don’t forget the App Store update content and keywords. We had done multiple languages all at once with a finished app, so once the checklist was made for the first language, the others followed the same guideline.
On the roadmaps for localization
- Look Out Local — Expansion into different countries with different URL endings and a drop-down selection of language support.
- New Line Designs — Creating Dutch, French and Spanish content for the catalogue of stickers testing Google Translate abilities.
- Word Capture — Allow you to capture other languages other an English and support localized app for more than English-speaking countries
We will be continuing to document localization and accessibility as there is not a lot of indie experiences out there. It took a lot of research to get to where we are now, but it shouldn’t.
Find Us Other Places
Juice Box Monkey Designs — Website
Twitter Account — @JBMDesigns
