A recent study from an internet translation firm, determined that almost all applications developed anywhere on the earth are written in English even if the developers aren’t from English speaking countries. 40% of the surveyed translations were general business applications, 30% were games (excluding gambling), and the rest 30% were applications from different categories.
App developers generally cater to precise markets, in order that they translate their applications into the most languages in their target audience. To illustrate, developers targeting the South American market (about 40% of the translated applications) translate their applications into Latin America Spanish and to Brazilian Portuguese. Developers targeting the ecu market (35% of the translated applications) translate their applications into German, French, Italian, Dutch, Spanish and Russian. Applications targeted at East Asian markets (about 20% of the applications) are translated into Japanese, Korean, Mandarin Chinese, Taiwanese, and Hindi. Finally, about 15% of applications are translated into Scandinavian languages including Norwegian, Swedish and Finnish.
Other markets, equivalent to the massive market of Arabic speakers, are still untapped by application developers, mainly since the business potential in these markets is low, despite the large variety of potential users. Some languages, like Arabic or Hebrew, require adapting the applying to display right-to-left text, and this requirement, which entails more development time and better costs, discourages many application developers.
Google recently selected One Hour Translation as a translation provider for the Android applications market. In accordance with the company’s VP of promoting, Mr. Yaron Kaufman, “43% of the successful applications are translated into additional languages, besides English.”
The group found that translating applications into leading languages ends up in a five-fold increase within the variety of users and purchases. They’ve found that for many developers, application translation is without doubt one of the simplest and cheapest the way to raise the variety of users and to reinforce purchases. It makes more sense to position outsourced effort into putting an application already that you can purchase into other languages than to construct a brand new app.