Rubric – Rachel Rener
Rubric – Mai-Anh Peterson
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About the Episode
I’ve heard from friends and past guests that localizing their app has led to increases in app downloads up to ten fold. So I brought on two amazing guests to give us a lesson on localization including tips on design, coding, and even testing.
Rachel Rener is Translation and Localization Account Manager at Rubric.
Mai-Anh Peterson is the Project Manager at Rubric
Show Notes
Lessons on localization:
- Localization is the process of making a product specific to a particular country or market.
- It entails more than translation as you need to ensure that you make your product or content is culturally relevant by talking into account local customs, regional sensitivity, religiosity, and even formatting.
- When deciding which country to localize, consider what type of app or product you are developing.
- A pitfall for localization is shaving off costs by localizing only few key words or just the screenshots. It’s appealing to get people to download the app right away but the better way to do it is to localize the whole app so they will feel that the app was made especially for them. Choosing to localize a few will get people upset after downloading and will result to your app being uninstalled.
Tips on Design, Coding, and Testing
Design is an absolute factor you should think about when localizing and you should have this in mind from the very beginning. Some countries read from right to left, a certain safe color can be offensive to some, what can be an 8-letter word in English can be made up of 47 characters in Polish…there is a long list of items which you should consider in your design.
When it comes to coding, make sure that your codes are properly encoded from the very onset to identify translatable and non-translatable text. Be wary of date/time formats, for example, and make sure developer comments are not being exposed upon translation by hiding them with hash tags.
Testing is also one of the major do’s in localization.Users have to have a good experience so test your compatibility, downloading, truncation, text in English, etc. Functional testing should be done alongside linguistic testing. Your aim should not be a localization that is good enough but a localization that is good in its own right.
Show Mentions
– Fav app: Accuweather: (iTunes | Google Play)
