La tienda de aplicaciones de Apple ahora está presente en más de 150 países y en 40 idiomas. Developers should benefit from this global audience and prepare their application to reach new users.

Apple has a special section with information about the internationalization of Apps and it presents some cases of companies that developed successful internationalization of their application. Among them, Evernote and Eurosport. The latter has situated its application in many languages.

“In just two years, Eurosport.com applications for iPhone and iPad have been downloaded more than 4.7 million times. This success is due in part to the fact that its content and interface are available in 10 languages, as this allows our applications to transcend national borders and become involved in a truly global sports fan base,“said Arnaud Maillard, Director of New Media of Eurosport.

Google also provides important resources to internationalize an App in the Play Store that you can review by clicking here.

To internationalize your application, you need to adapt it to a country and its language, using its text, correct date and time formats and the correct keyboard.

Translations

To make these adaptations, you can enlist the help of a large number of specialized companies, in addition from Google itself, which in the developer console trades with the translations of your Apps. On this occasion we will present the most notable:

Babble-on

Babble-on is based in San Francisco. They are specialized in placing mobile apps for the Apple App Store and Google Play. The price is 0.21 USD per word. They also propose accurate wording for the description of the application and the press release.

Website: https://www.ibabbleon.com/localize-my-app.html

ICanLocalize

ICanLocalize specialises in translations of websites, iPhone and Android apps. The Price is 0.09 USD per word.

Website: http://www.icanlocalize.com

LocalEyes

LocalEyes “LocalEyes makes your product local, so it can become global.” This company does not provide explicit prices, but you can request a free quote.

Website: http://www.localeyes.com

LocTeam

LocTeam specializes in Mac and iOS localization since 1990. They propose localization for both Mac software and iOS applications.

Website: http://www.locteam.net

OneSky

OneSky provides an interesting tool to audit the location of your application: https://www.oneskyapp.com/appgrader in exchange for your email. The price is 0.10 USD per word.

Website: https://www.oneskyapp.com

Units of Time and Measure

As of iOS 8, Apple provides an improved API for managing location. For example, they added the possibility of showing a quantity of time in different languages.

This API also provides the ability to manage energy, length and mass for multiple languages:

You can see a more detailed explanation of these iOS localization functions by clicking here.

App Store Optimisation (ASO)

Adapting your application to a new language and culture is only the first part of internationalization.

The optimization of positioning in the app stores (ASO) is essential if you want to reach new users in foreign countries. You can get more information about ASO by clicking here.

First you must adapt the title and description. Then you must choose the best keywords in the new language to increase visibility. The text in your final video and screenshots may also require updating.

Title and Descrciption

The description is the easiest part since a simple translation of the current description can be sufficient. However, we suggest that you grant some freedom to the translation service that you will use, to better adapt the description to a new language.

You must take special care when choosing the title. It is a good practice to add some important keywords in the titleand you must do the same with each new language.

Therefore, it is very important to select the best keywords and add the most important ones in the title.

Keywords

A good keyword is a word with a high volume and little competition.

Volume refers to the number of searches for a particular keyword. The competition refers to the number of applications that match this keyword.

Getting the right volume is a difficult task. Getting the right volume is a difficult task. Apple and Google do not provide any official data on the volume of Apps searches, but we can use tools such as Google Keyword Planner, which although it is focused more on Google Search keywords, is perfectly adaptable to Apps, both for Google Play Store and for Apple App Store.

It is also very important to understand that the volume of a keyword depends on the country and the language.

For example, let’s take the word “election” as it is used during elections in the United States. It will have a large volume in the United States but a very low volume in France.

Machine translation can lead to poor keywords. Also, you have no clue about the volume and competence of your translated keyword.

A perfect keyword in one language can automatically be translated into a very poor keyword in another language. For example, the word “automobile” will automatically translate into “voiture” in French.

But the keyword “voiture” has a very low volume. French-speaking users will search for “auto,” which is the most familiar and short form of saying “voiture” or “automobile.”

Below we will see very simple examples in which machine translation provides a poor keyword.

Machine translation can lead to totally useless and meaningless keywords.

In conclusion, using robots or Google translation is the easy and lazy way to locate your keywords. It is definitely better than doing nothing, but we advise everyone to use native keywords whenever possible.

It is also important that native dictionaries are dynamic. Both App Store and Play Store are evolving rapidly and constantly adapting to new classification trends. Therefore, it is essential to move forward with these changes.

Video and screenshots

App previews are available in both the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store.

You must be careful that only one language is accepted for a preview of the application.

In addition, the first two screenshots are displayed in the search results list by keyword. Therefore, you should try to be explicit with those screenshots.

You can add some schemes to describe your application. If you do, do not forget to also translate your text in the screenshots in each language.

Conclusion

Internationalization is not an easy task. However, “without effort there is no gain”.

You can experience a significant increase in the downloads of your App if you correctly perform internationalization.

Adapting your application to a new language is the easy part and companies specialized in this can help you.

You must also work on ASO (App Store optimisation) for each specific language. We advise developers to avoid automatic translation of their keywords, even if this is easy to do. We are convinced that using native dictionaries will provide much better keywords for a specific language.