A thought

Hi all,
I just had an idea, sitting here under the weather, how we could help each other in promoting our mobile applications. It is a long shot but I think we have nothing to lose and the amount of work is not that overwhelming.
As I saw from the introductory posts many of us are from different countries. Me myself I’m from Poland and being brought up here polish is my native language (yes, sooo obvious :)). Therefore maybe we could help each other by promoting our games in respective, language oriented forums? Of course I assume that most of us are already signed-up in major, native Android forums. Also I assume that we’re willing to spent a bit of time to translate our application descriptions to the respective languages (I would be very glad if somebody could do the translation to languages such as japanese, korean etc and even more, he or she could sent a post to the native forums ;)). What do you guys think? Maybe separate entry in the forum for that kind of work, David? Just a thought.
Cheers

I am pondering about this as well. And others seem to do so as well.

Targeting different languages may help. But I am not sure if that would suffice to get a proper kickoff. I am however interested in general in anything that simplifies promoting apps…

Might it be an idea to first try to catalogue some of these native language forums? Maybe you could update the OP / create a new thread and then we can get them listed by country / language.

Maybe its better to help each other translate the applications and android market description.
I think that would help more than posting on Android forums.

I already have description translations in Russian and Deutsche Martin and frankly it doesn’t help much

Well just in case.
Here’s a translation in Dutch of your game description.

Bouw je eigen raket en vlieg tot ver in de ruimte.
Word de eerste mens die land op de maan!
Manoeuvreer tussen obstakels en gebruik strategische ontwikkelingopties om de raket te verbeteren. Onthoud dat zonder deze verbeteringen je een met moeite ergens heen kan vliegen behalve richting de grond.
Bekijk jouw scores en ga de strijd aan tegen jouw vrienden via het OpenFeint netwerk.
Maar beleef vooral veel plezier met het besturen van jouw raket!
Dit is de eerste uitgave van dit spel. Meer functies en spel modus zullen in de toekomst worden toegevoegd!

And description has been attached :slight_smile: Thanks Martin, if you’ll wish to have something translated into polish just let me know;)

Martin, zet and falo, what would you say if I’d put (advertise) your games under one post at one of the polish forum? Then you could give a feedback how did it went, or have you saw the increase in downloads etc

This is difficult, rixment, because we don’t know where the downloads are coming from. I have a very small adcampaign running right now next to trying to optimize texts for being more “searchable”. We have no referrer - so all is left is to check if the net installs come from Poland.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not against any promotion - it’s just, I have no idea how to measure impact of such actions. Or does anyone know any ways?

Next to that: Translations! How do you translate your stuff right now? I wrote a small tool that displays originals next to the translations and I can see what has been changed since the last translation… I am/was simply not eager to work on the raw XML format for doing all that - overlooking newly introduced strings seemed to dangerous to me.

My tool is very basic so far but suffice my needs - but since it’s an webapp, it could be made available online - somehow. It wasn’t meant to be used that way though…

Translation is just done by making multiple string.xml files. You will have to be careful when introducing new strings, just make a habit of adding them to every language you have. Also do not use auto translation in your application, it will make your app look amateuristic. If you do not have the option to translate the app then stick with English. That’s my advice. You can use auto translate for the market description if you want, but again it will contain a lot of grammatical errors.

The problem with that is that if I do not add a string once or I am changing a string’s ID, I am going to have a problem to find out which string got “lost”… Therefore a linting which strings are present and which ones are missing is in my opinion just good practice. Do you know any such linting tools btw?

Great idea - I like your thinking! If people are interested I can set up a separate forum group for translation assistance, and people could post their app descriptions to be translated. I can see this being a productive setup in the long term.

This one’s a bit more difficult to organise. Perhaps when people see a new app in the “Promote Your App” section they could consider posting about it on other native language forums? If it’s a good app, this could help build awareness as you mentioned.

For translation I think crowdsourcing can be a good option too there are some companies offering crowdsourced translation