Is it worth translating app descriptions?

Hi everyone,

did anyone here have any positive results with translating their apps? Mine are in English, of course, but I could translate them to German, Hungarian, and to my native tongue.

Can you please share your experience?

Thanks.

I think it is. I once removed translations and the installs dropped significantly (10% maybe) after that. I had to revert them (at least the most important of them - for countries I had most downloads).

I think it will depend on the type of application.
For my first application “Math trainer” I decided to translate the description and title using the auto-translate in the old developer console. When looking for a math app a lot of people are searching for it in their native language and so my application got a pretty big increase in downloads. A pretty big reason for this was probably because I now got ranked quite high when searching for “math” in other languages too.
For games, I’m not sure if the downloads would increase by translating the description unless you have some specific feature or something that people might search for in their own language. But if it is an application that people would likely search for in their own language rather than in English to find, then I’d definitely give it a try.

Thanks to both for your replies. I’ve just wanted to add a translation and when I click “add translation”, this message appears: “In Google Play, we will either show an automated translation of the store listing using Google Translate or show the default language for your application which is currently English (United States) – en-US”

So, does this mean, that if someone searches for an app in German from Germany (memory training games, for example), would they also see my app among the results? Or are “manual” translations only good, if you know the language better, than Google Translate could translate it?

I’ve also published my apps on Amazon Store and now on Opera Portal. They don’t have automatic translations, so if nothing else, I’ll provide translations with Google’s Translate.

From my experience the game has more downloads when you manually add translation even if you do it using google translate.

Good to know, thanks, Magnesus. I will add translations to my apps ASAP. I will let you know guys if it improved my downloads.

Translations in the description page are absolutely necessary.
I still have to understand if translations of the internal language of the app have influence, but I suspect they have.
Generally I publish my apps with something like 20 internal languages and 30 googleplay languages…

That’s cool, Beppi. Do you use Google Translate or do you hire people for translations? Or, God forbid, do you speak 30 languages? :slight_smile: Thanks.

I speak only 20 languages unfortunately :smiley:

No, no, just making super-automatic translations :slight_smile:

Thanks for this little piece of useful info. It’s on my to-do list now! :slight_smile:

Google can translate your apps description:
https://services.google.com/fb/forms/apptranslationsignup/

PS. I translated myself 20 applications for a new languages (with Google Translator) and i have received 7-Day Notification of Google Play Developer Term Violation email. : )

You can’t do anything today without breaking some rules on Google Play. :frowning: The translations are not cheap from what I checked. And what to do when you want to update the translation? Pay again?

I wasn’t aware that this service exists, thanks for sharing, but as it costs money, I won’t use it. :frowning:

How did you manage to violate Google’s TOS with translating apps? Today I’ve translated one of my apps in 11 different languages (copy/pasting in Google Translate). Is this against their TOS? :confused:

Could you advice what is the cost of this translation service?

This is one of the better sites for translations, I think: Android Localization ? A Complete Tutorial They charge between .09-.13 per word.

Until it will be deleted, I’m using this service:
http://translate.google.com/toolkit/list?hl=en#translations/active
translation are not really good, often they are absolutely wrong, but at least it automatically translates xml files.
I’m thinking… is there some one able to create such an automatic service, using google translator, tu substitute the google toolkit? Parsing an xml file is not that difficult. It would be a real help for developers…

Looks good, Beppi, thanks for sharing.

What about WorkShop theme - what could he done wrong with translations so he got some kind of notice from Google?

I’m translating now my app’s descriptions using Google Translate - is this forbidden? I wasn0t able to find anything about that in Google’s TOS.

This is a little confusing - are you saying you used translate.google.com to do 10-20 translations of 20 applications (i.e. 10-20 x 20 translations of 3000 character descriptions) - and THAT got you banned ?

That was assuming you were logged into google using your google developer account ?

What if you used another browser with different cookies - or another computer/internet connection ?

I would not have expected this behavior - my own experience is of using translate.google.com to translate 1 application at a time with about 10-15 translations - the usual that are listed on Google Developer Console.

The way I went about it was many cycles of copying phrases over and seeing results - then doing translate back to english - if the results were generally the same, I assumed that the translation in the other language was reasonable. Then replacing some technical terms etc. which not translated well, replacing some terms with their English equivalent (if the english version is more recognizable internationally etc.).

Did not see a limit to use of translate.google.com for that at least.

I’m also a little confused by this. I can’t find any info which would prevent users to use Google Translate as much as they want. Also, there are other good services available, and if that would be the case, we could just use those.

Anyway, I’ve added 12 translations yesterday, and the results can already be seen. I don’t have the reports yet on my Developer Account, but Google Analytics shows 30% increase in traffic! That’s cool. :slight_smile:

Are you sure that’s why you received the 7-day notification violation e-mail?
I’ve used this technique for well over 2 years without a problem and there’s nothing against doing it from what I can see in their Policy.
Also, are you saying you only translated the app descriptions, but not the actual app itself?