Key languages for app store customers. Arabic?

IcedBIcedB Member, PRO Posts: 384
edited October 2012 in Business and Marketing Theory
Hey Guys,
I'm just in the process of having my app description translated into various languages. I don't know which markets are the largest worldwide so I'm just going on how many people speak each language.
Would anyone suggest releasing an arabic description?
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Comments

  • patapplepatapple Member Posts: 873
    read this and decide :)
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_number_of_native_speakers
  • wpatenwpaten Member, PRO Posts: 281
    We just went through that process ourselves for our last two apps. We ended going with the following languages based on our research:
    Chinese , Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Swedish. We looked into Arabic as well but if i remember correctly there is no "Arabic" store in itunes so we didnt go that route.

    Out of the ones that we localized the description for, we saw a marked raise in sales for Russian languages, as well as Swedish and Dutch. the rest stayed about the same.

    Hope this helps.
  • IcedBIcedB Member, PRO Posts: 384
    @wpaten Thanks that is a very similar list to mine, did you base your decision somewhat on previous leading revenue countries? because 70% of those are in my top 10 selling countries.

    Strange theres no arabic store, perhaps that will come!? When you translated to chinese the app store says traditional/simplified. However when translators say what type, they offer Mandarin or cantonese. Did you translate to both forms of Chinese.

    When you say a marked rise could you give a rough percentage increase please?

    Thanks a lot :)
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  • wpatenwpaten Member, PRO Posts: 281
    @wpaten Thanks that is a very similar list to mine, did you base your decision somewhat on previous leading revenue countries? because 70% of those are in my top 10 selling countries.

    Strange theres no arabic store, perhaps that will come!? When you translated to chinese the app store says traditional/simplified. However when translators say what type, they offer Mandarin or cantonese. Did you translate to both forms of Chinese.

    When you say a marked rise could you give a rough percentage increase please?

    Thanks a lot :)
    We took a look at a lot of other statistic sites dealing with Localization and came up with that list. It had less to do with Largest base of people speaking a certain language and more to do with largest base of people that spend money on apps. While Arabic has a huge amount of people who speak it, primarily from our experience, we have found that they do not convert very well from the free version as opposed to other languages.

    We chose Traditional Chinese. The localization company we chose knew which one we wanted when we told them that.

    When I say marked, it will vary depending on the language, however, we noticed that before localization, the areas speaking Russian had between 0-5 purchases in a given month and after the Localization we have probably closer to 50. So for Russia, it had a huge impact. We expected Japan to do better than it did, however we are still hopeful. The french and Italian languages also did better as well, though not as well as the Russian.

    I believe we spent close to $150 to have our description and keywords localized for the different languages for each app, and it made back the money in a matter of days for us.

    As a point of reference, we design children's apps. the demographic may or may not be different for the type of app that you are designing.

  • IcedBIcedB Member, PRO Posts: 384
    @wpaten, thanks again for all that information. Who was the company you used to do the conversions? I'm currently waiting back on a quote and wouldn't mind comparing the two.

    Did you also change the app titles? I believe that when you add a localisation it allows the title to be altered too.

    What's your company called by the way I'd be interested in seeing your work. Let me know if you ever need sounds or music, thats my home turf!

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  • wpatenwpaten Member, PRO Posts: 281
    @wpaten, thanks again for all that information. Who was the company you used to do the conversions? I'm currently waiting back on a quote and wouldn't mind comparing the two.

    Did you also change the app titles? I believe that when you add a localisation it allows the title to be altered too.

    What's your company called by the way I'd be interested in seeing your work. Let me know if you ever need sounds or music, thats my home turf!

    If you do a search for Tizzy on itunes and android, you should see our stuff. Tizzy Veterinarian, Tizzy Seasons, etc. Tizzy Labs is the name of our company.

    The name of the company we used is http://applingua.com/. They are not the cheapest but we felt comfortable using them. The guy is good with getting back to you on your emails pretty fast.

    We had the title, description, and keywords all localized. We tried to keep our word count to under 100 words if I remember correctly.
  • MarkOnTheIronMarkOnTheIron Member Posts: 1,447
    Also remember always to let a native speaker (not associated with the translation company you hired) to check the text. For example Applingua, mentioned by @wpaten, says in it's site that they provided the translation for "The lost city" by FMG, but its italian translation has some imperfections, as if it was translated by a very good, but not native, italian speaker.

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  • IcedBIcedB Member, PRO Posts: 384
    @wpaten I noticed that you stripped out a lot of your features from the original english and didn't included them in the translations. Was this to reduce costs?
    I got a quote back for 12p per word, which is like 18cents. Maybe they increased their quote, i asked for bulk discount and they said they'd budge a little but not much.

    Good tip @MarkOnTheIron
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  • MarkOnTheIronMarkOnTheIron Member Posts: 1,447
    @IcedB That's a high quote. On average very good translations are 0.08/0.10€ (0.10/0.13$ - 0.065/0.8£) per word, and you can also find translations for 0.04€ per words but those are risky.

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  • wpatenwpaten Member, PRO Posts: 281
    Yeah they are not the cheapest. They are just who we went with and who we felt comfortable with using, after reading reviews from other developers, etc.

    We definitely cut down from the English description, based solely on price. I think the word count from the English was like over 1000 words. So feasibly that was just going to be too much money across 10 different languages.

  • IcedBIcedB Member, PRO Posts: 384
    @MarkOnTheIron can you suggest anyone decent in the 10cent range? I've found a number of friends who can help for $15 in total each time but i don't know enough people for every language :(
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  • carlblanchetcarlblanchet Member Posts: 755
    I'll comment here so I can come back for later use of this info! :D
  • adlaimadlaim Member Posts: 68
    أكبر الأسواق في المتجر للغة العربية هي السعودية و مصر

    ^^Translate This from Arabic
  • IcedBIcedB Member, PRO Posts: 384
    @adlaim "The largest markets in the arabic "district" are Saudi and Egypt"

    More figures there folks, cheers adlaim :)
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  • TinpotTinpot Member Posts: 54
    @wpaten Out of Curiosity, did you localise your app as well as the App Description\Keywords? Or just the App Description\Keywords?

  • IcedBIcedB Member, PRO Posts: 384
    Just submitted my 300 word trimmed description. I paid for a secondary reviewer because my topic is quite a mind f**k with all its terminology and everyone who translated independently struggled a fair bit with many words. So should get my moneys worth =)
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  • IcedBIcedB Member, PRO Posts: 384
    Wow, I can localize managed to convert to Dutch in just one hour!
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