Question to the developpers(about translator's job)

I can only speak for myself, but as an American developer, I am not used to considering other languages a required feature. Americans have very little exposure to other languages besides English. Honestly, I wouldn't even know where to begin to translate my application.

From a iPhone developer's point of view, about 80% of sales come from the American store. Adding other languages just isn't worth the time.

 

Actually, developers posting in this thread have indicated a big increase in sales for certain regions when translations are made. It is true that it will never be the equivalent of the US store but maybe the numbers are so low in some countries because there is no local language version.

 

exactly why would someone buy a game that he wouldn't understand , its just like movies , how can you watch a chines movie if there are no subtitles at least

sales in other regions are less than USA because its not translated or localized , translated and localized games showed allot of income and sales for the guys who did it , and allot of people reported that here on the forum

 

I certainly belive that translations help a lot to the developers, just like it's shown in that thread.
Think about this, there are more than 80 countries where appstore is stablished. Think about the population that might not understand your game, and take in consideration Italian, French, Japanese, Chinese, not to mention many many spanish speaking countries.
I believe that a translation is a must do for big games, they help you increase your incomes.

 

I read that thread and don't see any numbers to say how much of an impact translation is.

I'm not trying to mean here but the volume of says possible in these other countries isn't large enough to justify the expense. English accounts for most of the sales on the AppStore.

 

So what about the 600 sales per day of the Japanese/French/German store at the top 10?

 

Well, I suppose 600 sales a day for three languages is pretty good. That's a good case for localization.

Who reported those numbers? The numbers I've seen quoted for foreign sales from my own experience and from developers developers have been much, much smaller.

 

http://firemintgames.blogspot.com/2009/04/flight-control-sales-numbers.html

 

I've earned much more from France/Japan/Spanish-speaking countries than it cost to do translations for those languages (especially Japan). If that doesn't justify the expense, I don't know what does.

--Eric

 

American devs shouldn't ignore other markets.
It's a little step for them to get a cheap localization.
I couldn't understand, why not to do it?

I'm translating many apps into German and people in my country are asking for it and we have got quite a big iPhone market.

So, if you like your app and you know it has quite some potential,
there is no reason not to do it. Except you don't want to increase your sales

 

You can cover most of wolrd languages just with these three ones: Spanish, English, and Chinesse. These was the most spoken languages in 2008 and sure 2009.

 

you forgot to mention Arabic

 

I totally agree with people saying translations is a must, Its really cheap, and lets say that you make a good app you can.
a) Sell less than the cost of translations
b) Sell exactly the same (impossible) but let the people of MANY MANY other countries know about your developing skills and future products
c) Sell way more than the cost of translation service and make people wait for updates and new apps from you.

Thats 2 out of 3 that are convinient for a developer...

 

OK perfect... numbers we can talk about...

So of those sales what percentage covers English speaking countries...

57% US
17% GB
2% AU
----
78%

You could argue Canada either way as English speaking or not I suppose so I didn't include it.

That data supports my position.

All I'm saying is that developers more don't localize because of the following:

1) Majority of sales are covered by English
2) There is an additional expense to localizing
3) Not all America developers are familiar with localizing because of cultural factors.

I'm not saying developers shouldn't localize. I was just trying to respond to the original poster's question.

If anyone has any other suggestions as to why developers don't localize, please add them. I'm not asking for additional reasons to localize.

I fully expect to localize my next iPhone game.

 

RealMaze is a Unity App, right? How did you go about localizing it?

 

I added a few lines of Objective-C code to the AppController.mm file which sets a preference to whatever language the player is using, and then I read that preference in the Unity code. Also there's an in-game menu which allows you to select the language manually.

Right now it's English and French; version 1.2 also has Spanish and Italian. I don't think I can add Japanese or Chinese because of the way fonts are handled...even with a 2048x2048 texture for the font you're stuck with a small point size for those languages, and since the iPhone is limited to 1024x1024, I doubt it would be legible. But there's not a huge amount of text anyway, and having the app store description being in Japanese is apparently enough to get the idea across.

--Eric