Is Mobile App Translation Optimized For Your Target Market Locations?

By Author: Shreya Gupta
Total Articles: 50
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It is a fallacy to assume that having a website perfectly designed and adequately translated is enough done. Nothing can be further from the truth in this age where smartphones have proliferated in almost every market and their appeal as well as usage has penetrated every consumer journey point.

Businesses are often ready to embrace the language localization needs that new, unfamiliar languages of a new market segment and consumer profile demand. They are quick to hire translators, implant proxies, document content and re-brand marketing for the taste and comfort of these new set of users. Website localization does take a lot of time and effort: getting the website thoroughly translated and re-designed for the nuances and expectations of going global or transnational. The market is also brimming with many translators and agencies who promise to facilitate this challenging process with their language expertise.

However, it would be a complete waste of this money, effort, and those tremendous strategic leaps being taken if one forgets the mobile app part of a user’s journey or marketing lifecycle. It would not ...
... help at all if one does a cursory service to this specific area. It is easy to clone whatever has been done for the website in unmindful and lazy ways to the mobile app. What is superficial is not only half-baked but also potent when it comes to long-term hazards of copy-pasting the content.

One has to appreciate the differences between the two mediums and acknowledge that user behavior and content strategy for language localization of a website may not correspond with those of mobile app.

It is vital to understand that given the very absence of a large-screen format, mobile apps inherently differ from to what pops up and appeals to a user on a website. Their space limitations aside, their user interface aspect, as well as operating system specs, make the whole process very different from what a website entails. Apart from the layout, visual parameters and processor speeds involved; one also has to consider the differences in hardware, storage, security etc., that a mobile device is constituted of.
Content has to be in consonance with the type of mobile apps enabled and their backend elements too, for instance – choosing between hybrid vs. native apps. APIs, their availability, their usage rights, their security features and their coding extensions have to be carefully taken into account.

The content may remain on the same theme or marketing strategy but there is not much room for it to remain exactly similar. It has to be proportionate to space, length, loading times, eye movement, UI taste and general app fatigue or heterogeneity that matter for a mobile device.

Good language service providers understand that for mobile apps, language translation, and localization is much more than simply hauling content from one language to another. The right service providers have the right set of resources and experience to dovetail marketing strategy and impact for a mobile device. They can take up difficulties arising out of form-factor limitations and can brilliantly convert these constraints into creative solutions.

They combine the core muscle of language translation service with the skin of a mobile device very carefully and beautifully. A business cannot overlook the need and specific requirements of a mobile app translation if it aspires to reach its target audience at the right moment, in the right frame of mind and without any processing burden. It knows that if it appeals to its customers with analytics-powered personalization, its apps can give meaning and depth to customer experiences.