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How to Plan the Localization App

How to Plan the Localization App

Sat, 10 Apr 2021

If your new app plans to grow incrementally, localization is just a matter of time. Localizing your app can help explore new markets and gain more users. This is why many app developers typically start thinking about expanding horizons and reaching new markets not long after release. Localization comes into play here.

Localizing an application means changing it to a new country or region by translating the user interface and making it suitable for cultural, social, and other local factors.

 

Determine Localization Languages Beforehand

Sometimes choosing all future locations for an app is extremely difficult before it’s released. And yes, the standard process looks like this — you’re testing your app’s audience with a single-language version first, and then expanding with the localization. It’s an insightful solution but it’s not ideal. And the explanation is that your app might have enough content that simply doesn’t function in a particular regional market that it will never be accepted without localization, even though you’ve done thorough research on the sector.

Build Your Interface around the Selected Languages

Usually, when designing the app interface, we recommend having some extra space for other languages. This rule applies to buttons, menu items, pop-ups, messages, and other elements of the UI, above all. But we got a better tack even. If you follow our recommendation and pre-select the locations in advance, you can create the interface for the language which is less space-efficient.

Do Not Hard-Code Your Text Strings

The problem is that the hard-coded text will not be there when you need to remove resource files (used for localization) from your source code, because it is not extractable. And therefore, that text will not be translated. So, one more rule of localization comes here. Design your app to be able to edit and translate every localizable line of text without changing the source code. Generally speaking, creating new images and other creative assets might be a good idea to select proper colors and in-app characters for the new locale. Even doing so is wasteful and inefficient just to insert the translated text alone.

Placeholders and Formatters Are Your Everything

When you need to find and edit the text inside your device, placeholders and formatters always seem like a good idea. But you also need to give placeholders access. Also, it is a good idea to create brief notes identifying placeholders, which help avoid confusion when a formatter or placeholder is wrongly linked to the previous text or is not related. Finally, bear in mind the information on numbers. It also has to be extractable and set in context. This advice refers to measurement time, dates, numbers, currencies, and units, which formats can differ across languages.

Mind Encodings and Fonts

Encoding problems occur if there are certain special characters and fonts in your input language that don’t have corresponding alternatives in the language selected. As a result, you can get some strange, unreadable characters after localization. And correction of these types of encoding errors requires a great deal of time and energy.

Once Ready For Localization, Try Pseudo-Translation

Finally, once all the technical stuff is set, try a pseudo-translation trick. There are a lot of great tools that can adjust the user interface so it looks like a target language. This program normally triggers a script that simulates the language selected. And they assemble a construct that could be checked accordingly during the standard QA process. These QA-experiments help test the length of text within UI-elements, spot errors in encoding, and expose hard-coded texts.

Prepare an App Glossary and Provide the Context

A glossary of localization contains in-app terms such as names, menu texts, items, statuses, characters, and other concepts that must be used consistently within the app. Remember, consistency with the glossary will improve UX for your end-user. Also, a glossary helps to optimize and streamline the entire process of localization.