Hi, this is A Minute of Overpass.
My name is Eric and I make apps.
Now this week, I wanna show you how to localize your app into other languages so it could
be used all over the world.
Okay, so, we recently created two new apps.
The Canned Text and Algebra Study Cards.
Canned Text came out last month.
Algebra Study Cards came out just yesterday.
Now the thing that's different about these two is we took the time before we release
them to translate them into as many languages as we can.
So it's called localizing the app.
We did this with Ear Spy a few years ago and it tripled our downloads.
We had like a thousand downloads of Ear Spy a day and it went up to three thousand.
So it was like a huge boost, right.
It really picked up in Brazil and Thailand and, you know, for some reason, those are
the two big places.
So I wanna kind of show you what I've done.
It might take a little bit over a minute but it's not impossible to do.
It's a little bit difficult administratively, but in code, it's not difficult.
So, if you don't know, I'll show you my screen here, Android and iPhone native programming
language both have a native way of doing this.
So, in Android, you have a something called a strings.xml file as a configuration file.
Now it's good practice when you use any text within your app, you put it in this file as
opposed to just putting it in the code.
And the reason for that is so you see here is an xml file, you know about Ear Spy.
Everywhere where we're using language in the app is in this file.
And the reason you do this is that, you know, you want to finish with all the development
that you could go through and have that translated into the other strings.xml file and include
those in the code and Android will automatically go through and take that file instead of the
default one.
So, I'll say, if it needs, say the string here Start Record, if it can't find that in
the local language file, it will go back to the default, which in this case would be English.
So, here you can see values.ar is in Arabic, values.ge is in German.And the platform itself
will handle right to left languages, you know, left right languages.
It does that very well.
Now, iPhone does the same thing except it uses something called a pList file or pList
folders where you put all the strings inside.
Now, when we developed Ear Spy to begin with, the developers didn't do any of that.
They just did, you know, they just got it working.
So, we had to go through and rewrite a considerable part of it just to get it, make it localizable.
So this is something to consider if you're having an app commissioned.
Just make sure your developers are doing it the right way.
Even if you only plan on doing it in English to begin with, later on you may want to broaden
your horizons and release it in other languages.
So what we're using is Corona SDK.
we're not using a native platform.
So we kinda have to write our own here.
Here's Algebra Study Cards.
We got all the strings here in the app in English, French, and German.
Basically, we took every language that was available on the app store and we had it translated.
So here's how we went about doing that.
Basically, when you're doing an app, what you wanna do is kinda have everything you
that you want in the app figured out as early on as you can and basically take everything
out and put into a spreadsheet.
And now, I use Google Sheets as opposed to Excel and I'll show you why.
Here's an example of a Google Sheet that we use.
And I've taken all the strings out of the app or all the, when I say strings, I mean
the text, and put it in a column.
We have a unique code here on the left, title, onclipboard.
And then right here we have what it actually means.
So, here it's actually Algebra Study Cards, and across the top here, I have every language
that I want it translated it into.
Now one of the nice things about Google sheets is it integrates really well with Google Translate.
So you're able to just use a little function here, Google translate; translate this into
English, translate this cell into French.
Translate it into English, translate it from English to French, from English into Spanish.
And we're able to just go through and create all these using Google Translate.
Now Google Translate is terrible for translation.
I don't recommend it.
But to begin with for testing, it was great.
So, what we ended up with after we take everything out is we have a spreadsheet like this.
So the nice thing, the second nice thing about Google Sheets is that it's very easy to share
with lots of people.
So what we did was we created an ODesk job.
It's the same thing I did with Ear Spy a few years ago.
It was much easier this time through with Google Sheets.
Just create an Odesk job and just say add as many languages as I can.
Here's the Odesk or, this week it was changed to Upwork, but here's the job saying less
than 1500 words translated from English into Chinese, Hindi, Danish, Zulu, and more.
And a brief description saying how many words that I have, what I want translated, and basically
saying that I'm willing to pay 5 dollars per language.I'm not looking for legal, a lot
of people come through saying they'll do it for 80 dollars.
Some people said a hundred dollars.
Some peopled would say, they're stuck with ten.
I was willing to go to ten, but you know, most people, I would go with five.
We got, every language was done.
Or most every language was done with that amount.
The other thing you need to do, right, and this is something that is very key is, don't
just take the words from the app.
You also have to take the words from the description.
So you have the app description, which you're gonna need done in other languages.
And also, you also need other app store strings.
You need the title for Google Play, you need the subtitle for Google Play, you need the
keywords for iTunes.
And if you're gonna do annotated screenshots or screenshots with texts on them, you need
to get all those translated as well.
So, depending on how you're gonna do that.
'Cause you wanna have the translations in the screenshots too.
So, basically, we took that, gave everybody access to this Google spreadsheet.
Everything is tracked so we can always roll back if somebody messed it up.
And they went through and every time somebody would work on it, I go through and check it
and I would highlight it green, just so I could keep track of which ones are done and
which ones aren't.
So for Canned Text here, you can see we have French, Italian, German.
We didn't find anybody to do Danish or Dutch.
We did, but they wanted a bit more money, and I just, you know, they weren't that important
to me so we stuck with the Google Translate for those.
We weren't able to get Belarusian, but we were able to get Afrikaans, for Arabic, and
just a few of them that we weren't able to do.
So, once that's done, we take this out, we put in back into the app.
Like I said, we're using Corona SDK so, we're using Excel and Google Sheets here, we could
easily write a formula here which would put it back into the format that we wanted in.
And then that way, it's a living document.
When we're finished, we just take that, put it back into the app.
So, and then once that's done, you have to do a few little things to make sure, with
the hybrid framework, to make sure that the app description actually change at the bottom,
and things like that.
But it's something that it really pays of in the end.
Now if you have an app and you can make it localizable to, you don't have to do every
language like we did, but the big ones.
I would recommend doing Portuguese definitely, Spanish afterwards, and Chinese Mandarin simplified
as opposed to traditional.
If you want to do three, do those.
So it worked really well.
We spent a lot less money than if we had gone through a service.
We had a lot more control over the process.
We me a lot of really good people doing it.
And we're really excited about these two apps.
So again, Algebra Study Cards was released yesterday, please have a look.
Canned Text was released last month.
Now, depending which language you're phone is set to, that's the language you should
see within the app.
That's it for this week's very long, but hopefully informative Minute of Overpass.
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