We rolled out small but easily noticeable changes to our project workspaces today. Re-designed header, as you can see on the left is not green anymore and it’s smaller. It takes less space from valuable information making the workspaces more user friendly. The icon is a bit smaller but it pops out more clearly against the dark background.

This is a part of our project to create more clearer design to whole service. We’re doing these improvements incrementally in simple batches so your team’s productivity doesn’t suffer due to major updates. Don’t forget to let us know how you feel about this change, we truly love feedback!

Why Localize?

No, I’m not going to start by selling the concept of localization to you. I know you’re a smart developer so it’s no news to you that localization benefits your revenue stream. But nevertheless I’ve added a couple of links at the end of this post, there you can find some insightful blog posts about this topic.

Getting Started

First of all, think about which markets you want to target and where you already have some users. Google Analytics or other analytics software can give you a good indication on where your users are coming from. Another option is to run a crowdsourced translation project to get some understanding on how active your users are in specific language areas (but we will discuss that in separate post).

As a developer you need to make sure your app is internationalized. That’s the process of separating your content to resource files so they can be translated more easily. You can learn more from our earlier blog post Software Internationalization for Dummies.

Additionally, internationalization is about making sure that the app can be easily translated. Here are a few hands-on tips:

1. Don’t split sentences into several strings. This makes it really difficult to translate and the quality will be bad. If you have to split texts, make sure you give proper context information.
2. Feel free to use tags e.g. %s, it’s much better than splitting the sentences. A proper translation tool will make sure that translators won’t mess them up.
3. Keep in mind that expressing the same thing in other languages can take up to 30% more space in the user interface compared to English (e.g. German). On the other hand, some languages might be “short”, but demand more height for the characters to look good and be readable (e.g. Chinese).

Get Everybody Together

So how should you actually implement the localization process for your product? It is very important that the translators are a part of your development team. Strings can be translated in many different ways and the translators need context information to produce good and correct translations. Context is almost as important information as the text itself. That’s why the translators need to know your product, inside out like every other team member. Typically you can differentiate good translators from bad ones by the questions they’re asking, the good ones ask questions about the context and the product.

The key question of the localization process: Will you update this app, website, user manual and/or other related documents after the first version? 

If the answer is yes, you need a localization platform where you can work with your translators. A localization platform is like a version control for your localization files. It knows which parts of the app are translated and can give you the exact status of the translation. A good platform also enables just-in-time (JIT) translations, so your app or document can be instantly translated after modification. The localization platform also helps you to communicate with the translator, you can be sure that same translator is always translating the updates and is a part of your development team. Key considerations when planning the long-term localization approach for your app, document or website:

1. You want to avoid feeling the localization pain when you have to make the change, right? Make it easy to do changes from the start.
2. Get to know your translators so that you can trust them. It’s the only way to be sure that you’re getting the right stuff.
3. Enable communication between translators and rest of the team. Kill the silos!
4. Make sure that translators are using your app!  They need to be a part of your team.

Translation – It’s Actually Really Affordable

Thanks to an industry that has been pushing prices down in fierce competition, you can get quality translations for really reasonable prices. You can find several translation sites and companies that offer translation in bulk. However, spend some time to find your own translators. They’re as important as your other team members. There are several sites, where you can find freelancers, for example Freelancer.com and Elance. There’s also ProZ.com that is targeted specifically at translators. We’re also working on our own marketplace that will allow you to find and hire professional translators directly to your Get Localization project.

Remember, localization is not just about translation. Your translators can give valuable feedback on how your app works in their local market. So make sure to collaborate with them!

You can learn more about our localization platform Get Localization at http://www.getlocalization.com.

Get Localization is a social platform for creating apps that really feel local for every user.

And here, those promised links:

The Importance of Localization in App Stores

Localization is the Key to Be Part of China’s 5.5 Billion App Downloads in 2012, Says ABI Research

Localization: the next big to-do for mobile app developers?

You often think it’s a simple thing if you have to fix a small typo from original string or add a missing article, dot or comma… At least until you have to deal with the consequences. With most file formats, you will lose all the translations and you will have to fix them manually to every file. Some people write scripts for this, most people hail the new Get Localization feature that makes this problem a distant past.

We’ve heard your feedback and the feature is called “Import notifications”. You will get an instant and simple notification when you’ve changed a master string a bit (in other words, not much) when comparing to previous revision. We let you decide whether you want to keep all the translations for this string or not. In most cases, small change doesn’t necessarily mean that the meaning is changed. Even if there’s a small typo, translation is not typically affected by it so you can safely let system to keep translation.

Here’s also video that demonstrates the feature in more detail.

I would like to briefly introduce you to our new product that is currently not yet released in Get Localization but will be available for public later this year. You’ve seen our In-Page Editor, right? Well the tech savvy user instantly asks a question “How do I get those translations to our site?”. There’s multiple solutions for that:

1. You can use traditional localization/internationalization file approach the most application frameworks offer. In-page Editor automatically detects even complex strings from websites and can populate them automatically. Let’s say if you’ve string “Hello Mike” in your website and translator translates it to “Hola Mike”, we automatically populate the translation to interpolated string “Hello %s”. These strings are of course also available for edit in our traditional editor as well.

2. You can use our API’s to fetch translations. Get Localization REST API allows you to do the translation work in your back-end and Get Localization Translate API makes it possible to translate in front-end/client-side with JavaScript. This API again works with interpolated strings as well, so if there’s translation for “Hello %s”, it’s able to translate “Hello Mike” correctly.

Or then, you can use Get Localization SmartFront. It’s a clever new way to translate websites without using any localization files or any modifications to code itself. You can take any HTML content, translate it with Get Localization and it’s available via SmartFront in your preferred domain name. Let’s say your company website is in address www.mycompany.com and you’d like to get that translated to Spanish. To get started you create a domain or sub-domain for this language, let’s say es.mycompany.com and point it to  SmartFront content delivery network (CDN). From our CDN, we provide the translated version of your site dynamically and instantly to the user.

So in short, Get Localization SmartFront offers a really effortless way to translate websites without touching the actual code.  We’re looking to get this out as a part of the Get Localization self-service offering as well, so it would be easy to even small developers to try it out and start using it. But currently if you’re interested of trial or how to work with us, please contact directly our sales at sales@getlocalization.com.