Hey! This is the Daily Overpass! My name is Eric and I make apps!
Now today, I want to talk about why you should not use Google Translate to translate your apps.
Okay, so a lot of times I talk about the biggest increase in downloads I've ever had was when I localized my biggest app into like the
top 20 languages that were visiting it. And now, I saw my downloads triple
overnight. It was fantastic, right? I also talked about the way I went about
doing that I contracted like loads of translation services and they wanted
something like a thousand dollars to do it which I thought I just didn't
have the money to do. And I thought that was ridiculous considering the amount of
words that I had. So what I did was I took all the words out of the strengths
of XML, out of the description, you know, all the text that I was using
in the screenshots everything like that and I put them into Google Docs, Google
Sheets and Google Docs and I went out on to Upwork and I found translators all
over the world. In fact, I did more than 20 and I said I'll do it for $5 a
language. Would you be willing to do this amount of words? And I got a lot of
people who did it. Some of them might have been 15 year old
kids but I didn't really care because I didn't need professional translation
services. They weren't supposed to be like legal documents or anything like
that, but I've talked about this before. And the response to that has
always been - there's always been two responses to that. One is how do you know
those people are good enough to be translators? How do you know they're not
just saying like swear words in there and everything? And I always say, "Well,
because they are on Upwork and they have reviews and all that stuff.
And the other side they say why don't you just use Google Translate? The
reason is Google Translate sucks. Let me just read this email I got
this weekend from Griffin in the Netherlands. He said, Dear Overpass,
I'm Griffin from the Netherlands and I really like your YouTube channel so I
decided to take a look at your apps. I discovered that the title translation of
Ear Spy is not correct. In Dutch it says Ear Spy: Super Terechtzitting. Sorry. But the
word terechtzitting means - in Dutch means court case. So, rather than super
hearing, it's saying hearing as a court case. I don't think that's the right translation
for the app title. I really enjoy your YouTube videos. Keep up the good work."
Yeah, okay. So, this is kind of embarrassing. You know, I don't think
this is the first time I heard it, so in that particular occasion I decided it
was just called Ear Spy and I wanted to add super hearing. So I did that on
English and I didn't want to just take those two little extra keywords and like
send them out to all those translators again and wait like two weeks for
everything to come back, so in that occasion I did use Google Translate.
This is why Google Translate sucks. It's really good - Google Translate, I mean, I
just say it sucks is relative because it is an awesome tool. The fact that
it does what it does is amazing. But I like to use Google Translate for
consuming information rather than producing it. In this case, I thought
this is just a small little thing. I don't really want to do it and you know,
you see what happens. This is the kind of stuff that happens.
Google Translate - for those who don't speak lots of languages and haven't
learned different types of languages, most of the time there's not a
one-to-one relationship between one word and another. So, it's not like an
algorithm. They could run the fact that they have all that machine learning and
everything in place and I'm sure Google Translate takes a lot of things from
context. So I type in super hearing, it probably doesn't know what it
is I mean to say. Anyway, I just wanted to point that out to you, guys. I still
highly recommend it. If you're going to get your apps translated, just go onto
Upwork. So like rather than spend a thousand dollars to get my app
translated and it wasn't a lot of work and a lot of words at the time, I spent
about a hundred or maybe maybe 150. I mean, some languages I couldn't find the
right translators for them like Japanese, Swedish, those ones were - I
couldn't find anybody who would do it for five dollars. It was like ten dollars
occasionally it would go up to fifteen dollars at the time, but you know, like I
said I didn't need professional translation. I just needed to test
it ou. If it was a legal document that might be different. So, for those
guys who are thinking about - so, I think one of the things is what you should do
is make sure that you have all your key words tight in their natural language, in
English, like in my case, and then once you start getting a bit of traction
there at that point, go ahead and get it translated to other languages because
otherwise every time you want to make one little tweak
like I did with this one, you have to go through all those translators or you
could risk - you could risk Google Translate. The embarrassing thing about
this is I think this is the second time somebody told me this about the Dutch
translation and I just - man, I need to fix it. In fact, if anybody out there knows
the Dutch for super hearing, like hearing and not the court case, you know, please
put it into comments and I'll update the app. Anyway, that is it for today. I'll talk to
you, guys, tomorrow!