Help each other with translations?

Hi everybody!

I live in Austria and I see a lot of app descriptions in the German speaking store that are horrible (obviously automated Google translations). Why not check each other’s descriptions in our mother tongue and help each other with translations of little phrases (e.g. to announce a spontaneous weekend sale).

Our app features five languages and lately an Italian user complained about a misleading description. So I wanted to change it but I’d have had to contact a localisation service to have it done. So I came up with a little phrase by myself and it would have been great to just have somebody check it quickly.

I’d offer to check your German stuff (and I can speak French, at least somehow). Anyone interested in exchanging this type of service here somewhere in the forum?
(Of course this works mainly for short texts or a quick check; I’m not asking for or offering full translations of long texts.)

I’ll happily check anyone’s English if they want. Although it will tend to be more like English instead of American English :slight_smile:

But perhaps we should expand this thread to list any app translation services that anyone knows of or has used ?

I know I want to eventually produce Spanish, German and Japanese versions of WordHero…

doesn’t rely wordhero on a whole bunch of different words to work.

I would suggest you to start making a german version, because for me, germany is in line with US (in terms of downloads) when the app is free. paid apps normally have more revenue in US.

Spanish could be troublesome because there is spanish, portugese and argentinian etc which all has different usages of some words (as far as i know).

by the way: m-ilk, I am born in austria and lived there for nearly 30 years :slight_smile:

Do not use automatic translation - that reads such ugly. especially english->german is very bad somehow

Exactly! Browsing the Play store can be horrible. The awkward translations really give a feeling of low-quality, rubbish stuff, even if the apps themselves might not be that bad. But the texts sometimes discourage me from trying them out.

So if anybody want their German texts checked contact me.

@reiti: I was born in Germany but have been living in Austria for 16 years now. :slight_smile:

Normally I do only translate the descriptions to the language the game really supports - otherwise it leads to wrong expecdations - which I do not want, because that can lead to bad ratings :wink:

Good point. :slight_smile:
And I guess what you are maybe also trying to say is that once you have decided to implement another language you would have a localisation studio translate your ingame texts and of course your product description at the same time. In this case you wouldn’t need help from anybody on this board.

However, maybe later on you might just want to make little changes, add one or two lines, announce a little sale for the weekend, etc. You know, things not big enough to give to a translation studio because it’s just a little phrase, which, nevertheless, should be correctly formulated.

I can help with Polish language. I have a huge number of Germans who like my games - I’d definitely want to improve my translation to that language. I know Deutsch very, very little (learning it for 3 years gave me nothing :slight_smile: ). I’ve sent you a PM about it.

I can help with translation to Hebrew and Russian.

Hi m-ilk,
I can help you on Italian. :slight_smile:

Thanks for offering your help, folks! Might come back on it.

@Magnesus: I just PMed you an improved version of your German Mahjong HD text.

Note: His automated translation is currently telling German users that the game’s high resolution tiles are especially designed for ‘Tabletten’ (= ‘pills’, the pharmaceutic synonym of ‘tablets’). :slight_smile:

Hi m-ilk,
You can tell me the English and Italian phrases and I’ll check it :slight_smile:

I am about to release a voice changing type of app.

It has a fairly simple interface.

For that I was wondering how aggressive to be with the localization.

Someone here suggested that doing half-baked localization can lead to low ratings.

I have just translated the initial screen - and not bothered with the main screen or graphics which also has some words in it.

I supposed I should do that too - the problem is the fewer words on the screen - like Record/play - I am not sure if I could get the translations right (as sometimes for small context-less words the translations from google translate can be many and hard to choose from).

In any case, this is the technique I used - using google translate - for the description.

I would translate phrases (try to simplify them if were complicated or colloquial).

Then I would translate them back into english.

The presumption being that such a circular check MAY get rid of the most obvious weaknesses.

One problem I found (and I didn’t have a lot of text) was in words for Agree or Disagree or confirmation dialog type words.

The translations give many alternatives - and one wonders if a particular use would be quaint to the native speaker (although technically correct).

Anyway, just some thoughts.

Does localization HELP an app - in terms of maybe getting it more noticed where it would not otherwise be ?

Or can it wind up hurting - as suggested above - that a reasonably good looking app may look more amateurish with the sloppy translation effort.

Hi guys,
This is my first post on this forum (although I do watch it for some time now).

Anyway, if you consider Romania a market for your app, I can translate it to Romanian (from English only).

Cheers,
Mircea

I just released the voice changer app - I noticed that Korea and Japan were not figuring highly in the stats.

I had put in localization of the basic screen text etc. - and when posting used google play’s automatic translation (making sure to put the english stuff in brackets or separate).

However Korea and Japan are 0.8% of installs - much lower than I would have expected.

Should I perhaps have posted this with english instead of korean/japanese ? Perhaps in these countries the users would be looking for english descriptions for such things.

Or are there specific app markets that are visited more often by the korean/japan user base ?

There’s no problem with spanish usage, 'cause it’s true we have different words for some things, but we all understand each other. For example, we can’t talk Spanish from Spain in Argentina, but we fully understand it. The same with Colombia, Ecuador, Venezuela and so on.

If you need to translate your game to Spanish, pm me ;).

About my game, Chubby Bird, it has a lot of installations in China, but the game isn’t in chinese. My friend translated it into korean, but the game has no downloads on korean’s google play market. I need to know how I can join into that market! >.<

Hello,

I’m new to this forum. I would be very happy to help you with french translation.

Bretzelsoft

I’d like to get some of my apps translated, I’m even willing to pay for it. So if anyone has time, I’d prefer to pay developers here to do it than anyone else, please pm me.

One thing I’m wondering though, I have a wordsearch game and it uses “Word Themes”. They are lists of words that are often synonyms and I’m wondering if other languages have enough synonyms of some english words to fill my 30 word category minimum? For instance below is one of my word themes you can play:

<string-array name=“words2”>
<item>LOVE</item>
<item>DEVOTION</item>
<item>PARTIALITY</item>
<item>EMOTION</item>
<item>ENCHANTMENT</item>
<item>PASH</item>
<item>ADULATION</item>
<item>ENJOYMENT</item>
<item>PASSION</item>
<item>AFFECTION</item>
<item>FERVOR</item>
<item>PIETY</item>
<item>ALLEGIANCE</item>
<item>FIDELITY</item>
<item>RAPTURE</item>
<item>AMITY</item>
<item>FLAME</item>
<item>REGARD</item>
<item>AMOROUSNESS</item>
<item>FONDNESS</item>
<item>RELISH</item>
<item>AMOUR</item>
<item>FRIENDSHIP</item>
<item>RESPECT</item>
<item>APPRECIATION</item>
<item>HANKERING</item>
<item>SENTIMENT</item>
<item>ARDENCY</item>
<item>ARDOR</item>
<item>INCLINATION</item>
<item>TASTE</item>
<item>ATTACHMENT</item>
<item>INFATUATION</item>
<item>TENDERNESS</item>
<item>CASE</item>
<item>INVOLVEMENT</item>
<item>HOTS</item>
<item>CHERISHING</item>
<item>LIKE</item>
<item>CRASH</item>
<item>LIKING</item>
<item>WILD</item>
<item>CRUSH</item>
<item>LUST</item>
<item>WORSHIP</item>
<item>DELIGHT</item>
<item>MAD</item>
<item>YEARNING</item>
<item>DEVOTEDNESS</item>
<item>ZEAL</item>
</string-array>

The category is “Love”. In english “Crush” is a term for love, but I don’t think it means the same in any other language. I’m wondering since some of the synonyms I’ve used mean something different in another language, if I’d be able to translate these words lists?

Hello!

If you want, I can help you with translation to Hungarian.

Hi Mat, I sent you a pm, thanks!