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When Sharon joined her family’s hotel business after completing her education, they already had at least one hotel in each of the major cities in European countries. She had her eyes set on expanding to APAC. Concentrated on spending at least a month in each of the departments so that she understood the business from a practical point of view. Going through the reports, Sharon realized that the registrations done through mobile app had huge fluctuations from City to city.
Going deeper she realized that mobile app registration is accounted for more than 80% of individual registrations in cities with a large English-speaking population. In fact, the registration rates were proportional to the English-speaking population in any City. She set her IT team or target of localizing the app for all the cities where they are operated.
Within 6 months they were able to roll out the localized apps and there was a hundred 25% jump in registration through the app in non-English speaking cities. Realizing the importance of localized apps in customer acquisition, Sharon made it her first priority for expansion into the APAC region.
Businesses thrive when they succeed in establishing appropriate communication with their customers. It becomes even more essential when expanding into new geographic locations because the credibility has to be re-established. Typically, businesses localize all their offerings to maximize reach.
As mobile applications are one of the important channels of communication, and sometimes double up as a product, providing them in the local language massively improves chances of success.
In this article we will look at how multilingual app support is a critical tool every business must-have. We will also discuss how mobile operating systems and app development frameworks help developers in providing multilingual support in their mobile applications.
The process of adapting an application for a specific region or language by translating its assets like text and images, and adding locale-specific contents is called localization. Structuring an app’s code and UI for localization is called inter-nationalization.
A country or region can have multiple languages. For instance, in Canada, both English and French are equally popular. A smart business would launch its app in both languages to increase the number of downloads. In fact, case studies and surveys have proved that multilingual apps perform much better than single language apps. People prefer to use the Internet in their own language. A Common Sense Advisory survey revealed that:
Ideally, any app that needs to be localized must be Internationalized first. And this should happen in the design phase itself. Forward-looking businesses always internationalize their apps so that they are prepared to foray into other regions or languages when the need be.
Providing localized language support for an app convinces the users that you are not there just for business; you wish to be a part of the community. It becomes an important determinant when potential customers are deciding whether to choose your product or not. Some of the advantages of multilingual apps include:
Some aspects of the app that need to be localized include:
Providing an app in the local language is not simply translating the app — options, menus, text messages, etc. It also includes modifying the language so as to take care of cultural preferences. For instance, a phrase that is acceptable in one culture or region may be found offensive in another. Or, the same holiday can fall on different dates in different parts of the world. The team responsible for localizing the existing app must be aware of cultural nuances and include them in their apps.
Some of the challenges while providing multilingual support in mobile apps include:
Almost all mobile OS provide inter-nationalization and localization support. Let us see how the two most popular mobile OS – Android and iOS – do this.
Android provides full localization support for apps developed using the Android Development Kit. The culture-specific files can be saved in the res/ directory, which is automatically created when a project is created.
Android OS provides full support for both LTR and RTL scripts. This means that the OS can detect script direction and adjust everything else accordingly.
Formatting text messages is an important task in localization. Usually, they are formatted by inserting text and numeric data into the appropriate position. However, in the case of RTL scripts, care has to be taken where these text and numeric data are inserted and how. Because even though the script is right to left, the numbers used maybe LTR. Where a piece of text is starting and where it is ending will decide how the localized text is inserted.
Android provides the unicodeWrap() method in the BidiFormatter class, which automatically detects the direction of the string and ensures that the inserted text or number is displayed in the correct way.
Android also supports layout mirroring, which means that apps with RTL script will have right aligned menus, right-aligned text and forward arrows pointing to the left.
Tools like XCode 11 Apple API auto layout and Unicode support make it easy to structure iOS app development for localization, without having a list of languages and regions in which they must be available.
Mobile OS can be used only for react native app development. Other app development frameworks that facilitate cross-platform development also enable the development of i18n apps. i18n is the abbreviation for inter-nationalization.
Xamarin app development is one of the most popular mobile app development platforms. Building mobile apps with Xamarin also makes it easy to handle multiple languages simultaneously:
Angular has built-in pipes to display dates, numbers, currencies, percentages, etc. in the local format. Plural forms of expressions can be tricky and they can be easily marked in Angular apps. Other text, including Alt Text, to be translated can be marked as well. Angular CLI can then be used to extract the marked text to a source language file, which can be shared for translation. The same CLI can then be used to merge the translated text back into the app.
By default, Flutter only supports US English localizations. If you want support for other languages, the application must include a separate package called flutter_localizations. As of February 2020, this package supported 77 languages. But it is possible to add new language above and beyond these 77. You just need to provide approximately 70 localizations for words and phrases.
There are multiple ways in which React Native apps can be localized. The easiest is using react-native-localize with i18n-js, a popular inter-nationalization library.
TechAhead has over 10 years of expertise in developing inter-nationalized apps. Our experts design all solutions with i18n standards in mind, so that clients do not need to worry about localization in future when they scale up operations to other geographic locations.
Adopting an application for a specific regional language by translating its Assets and adding local specific contents is called localization. These assets may be text images or audio-visual content. Structuring and apps code for and UI for localization is called inter-nationalization. There are many countries that themselves have multiple languages.
Businesses often localize their apps for these languages so that too to increase customer acquisition and engagement. This is important because 72.4% of consumers are more likely to buy a product that has information in their own language. Any app that has to be localized must be Inter-nationalized first. Having multilingual l apps facilitates entry to know your markets, increases downloads drives customer acquisition and improves customer loyalty.
The increased downloads also improve revenue and App Store ranking. localizing an app involves translating text, image Kama audio comic video comic etc.; date and time format; currency and culture specific information. Almost all mobile operating systems and app development frameworks provide inter-nationalization and localization support.
Both Androidand iOS provide full support for both LTR (Left to Right) and RTL (Right to Left) scripts together with layout mirroring. Mobile app development apps like Xamarin, Angular, Flutter and React Native also have full i18n support.
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