One of the great things about the international app market
is that through platforms like Apple’s App Store and Google Play, app
developers and mobile entrepreneurs can access huge numbers of users in vast
geographic regions. One massive barrier, though, is language.
If you’re looking to develop a mobile application for phones
and tablets and you intend to reach massive audiences, you’re going to have to
come to terms with some realities. Namely, 72% of your potential customers are
not native English speakers and most of them would prefer using an app in their
native tongue.
So says One Hour Translation, a Washington, D.C.-based
company that handles over 50,000 translation projects per month in the legal,
technical, web, app, software, marketing, and enterprise sectors. The company,
founded in 2008 and headed by Ofer Shoshan, raised $10 million last January.
When deciding which languages adopt, app-designers and
entrepreneurs need to ask themselves whether they’re shooting for volume or
paid downloads, says Shoshan. “If, for instance, the goal is monetization, have
the app translated to Spanish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean and
Dutch – these are markets where there are more customers paying for downloads.
But if the goal is to maximize downloads, translate to languages such as
Mandarin Chinese, Portuguese and Russian.”
Business intel firm App Annie’s Distimo released a study in
late 2012 after seeing how 200 different mobile apps fared in different
countries after releasing products for iPhone in those nations’ native
languages. Downloads increased 120% while revenue went up 26%. Those are
desirable jumps indeed, and those are relatively old figures—there are more
people with mobile devices now. In fact, its projected that by 2017, 87% of
connected devices will be tablets and smartphones.
Based on One Hour Translation’s in-the-wild stats, languages
most in demand for app translation right now are: Spanish (60%), German (45%),
French (40%), Portuguese (30%), Italian (25%), Dutch (22%), Korean (20%),
Japanese (15%), Chinese (12%).
No comments:
Post a Comment