Why I created InAppTranslation

Two weeks ago, we launched the service called “InAppTranslation”. InAppTranslation is a tool for an app developer to infuse translation data over the air from web dashboard.

When I got this idea two years ago, I was working on a training app called “MY ASICS”, and tried localizing the app to nearly 10 languages.
There are a lot of manual work in the app localization process.
The translation company sent us the translation data in several excel files, and I copied each word or phrases to Localizable.strings file (which is the file to contain translation data for each language in iOS world).
I was spending tens of hours to copying and pasting words and phrases, and the works is very error-prone and not creative.

One time, I made mistakenly pasted German translation data to Localizable.strings file of Dutch, and released the app, and got feedback from users in Netherland. During the 7-day review process in Apple after submitting the modified app, I couldn’t stop worrying about bad reviews coming from Dutch users. Thanks to the fact that most Dutch people understands German, we didn’t loose any AppStore score.

After this experience, I started thinking whether there might be a way to make the localization process easier and flexible and started creating InAppTranslation.

InAppTranslation is a tool for app developers to infuse translation data via the cloud. With this localization tool, NSLocalizedString is connected to the translation data in the cloud. You no longer have to update Localizable.strings files.
Please visit,
https://inapptranslation.com