Is it worth it to translate an Android app into Spanish and other languages?

Question

I have the "user's side" of the story, I think they want it better if it's on Spanish. But, what about the programmers? Do you make your programs multi-language? Why? Why not? Who translate your software? Are you ok with paying somebody to translate your app or you prefer doing it yourselves? Is the benefit bigger than the costs?

Answer 1

There's really only one question you need to answer:

Is there a demand for the application to be translated into one (or more) other language?

If the demand is there then you need to look into translation. There may be political (both with a lower case "p" and upper case "P" - bilingual countries like Canada spring to mind), social or ethical reasons that need to be considered as well as the cost.

As to the methodology - when I worked on software that was translated we got our German and French distributors to do the translation. The benefit of this is that you are using someone who knows the product and will (hopefully) choose the most appropriate translation when more than one is available.

If you don't have distributors familiar with the language then there are services available that will do the translation for you.

Failing that there's always Google Translate :)

Answer 2

If you are selling a reasonable number of units already and you have no reason to believe that the app would be any less applicable to Spanish speakers, then I think it's probably worthwhile to give it a go. If you are using the Android strings.xml resource to separate the text from the application, it is straightforward to add more languages.

There are online translation bureaus (such as this one) that will do translations for a few cents per word. I haven't tried them yet, so I can't vouch for them, but it's something I'm considering.

Unless you have a very wordy application, you can probably get it translated for less than $50, in which case you'd only need a modest increase in sales from Spanish-speakers to make it worthwhile.

In my own modest Android sales, 95%+ of orders come from English-speaking countries (over 90% of sales are from just the UK, US and Australia). That massive skew suggests to me that I would sell more if the apps were available in French and German too.

Answer 3

Often not, for a couple reasons:

1. If the English is simple, it's often best to leave it as-is. Computer users are generally quite tolerant of having English here and there. Japanese people live with having English on our computers all the time, and our English education is notoriously poor.

   Unless you expect to target a not-very-English-tolerant sector of the Spanish market, you may be able to get away with having no translation at all.

2. When something goes wrong or when we get lost, it's often better that the labels and error messages are all in one language so that the user can find help more easily.

   For instance, I'll get more helpful results on Google if I query for "An unhandled exception has occured" than if I query for "キャッチされていない例外が発生しました".

I think the general rule of thumb is that if your app is targeted to techies or otherwise relatively internationally inclined people, you can save yourself some time and money by not translating.

Answer 4

I believe one should also consider the negative consequences of providing localizations.

1. People will be offended by bad translations, especially if they could use the English version before and now they are auto-detected and forced to use the translated version.

2. Users of languages left out will feel offended if you provide a translation for another language, especially again if you force them to use it through regional/linguistic match.

   • French <-> Belgian Dutch
   • Simplified Chinese <-> Traditional Chinese
   • European French <-> Canadian French
   • and many more