Month: June 2011

Ovi Store and Application Languages

Earlier today Nokia’s Developer organization (aptly named Nokia Developer) released a set of really interesting numbers.

See the article here: http://www.developer.nokia.com/Distribute/Ovi_Store_statistics.xhtml#article0

Let’s drill down behind the numbers and reflect for a second what they mean for selling and marketing your app. From astounding fact that Ovi Store is available in 190 markets to interesting tidbit that Turkey sees 1.6 downloads a week this article is a must read for anyone doing software localization.

90% of Ovi Store users have Ovi Store in their local languages (Ovi Store supports 32 languages)
So 9 out of 10 Ovi users see the store in their own language. What does that mean? First of all: your app needs to speak local language. We knew that already didn’t we? But secondly and even more importantly: your support and marketing material (like webpages) needs to speak user’s language. Localized apps and support material stand out in the crowd of English only apps and it makes it more likely that your app is promoted in country specific recommended lists (it also helps if you have a strong local brand).

The 10 most active markets are (in alphabetical order): China, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, the U.K. and Vietnam

To fully reach all top 10 most active markets your application needs to speak:

  • Chinese (Simplified)
  • German
  • At least English, Hindi
  • Indonesian
  • Italian
  • Russian
  • Arabic
  • Turkish
  • Vietnamese

Only top 10 countries you can cover with English are India and UK. And Latin character set gets us only half-way through this list. We have Right-to-Left language Arabic and we have Top to Bottom languages like Chinese. And we have cyrillic alphabet in Russian. Surprisingly no Spanish speaking markets are in top 10 of Ovi Store, but Spain is mentioned as one of the top 15 countries along with France. For app developer this list is a good check list for answering following questions:

  • What languages I should support with my app?
  • Is my web page and marketing material available in all relevant languages?
  • Am I addressing the right markets with my app?
  • What does it mean for my application to support Right-to-Left/non-Latin character set languages?
  • Is my beta test audience right?
  • Is “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” sung by William Shatner the greatest song ever? (yes it is)

It would interesting to drill down even further to these numbers. What is the actual order of these countries? What are the top grossing countries? Hopefully we will get to see these numbers next time.

Other Ovi Store Facts

Series 40 accounts for 25% of the Ovi Store downloads. And number of Series 40 devices out there is mind-boggling: 650 million. Series 40 users would form the third biggest country by population in the world!

In China Ovi Store is 7 times bigger than Apple App Store.

Active users download something 8.5 times a month.

Interesting numbers, aren’t they? What is the most important or interesting of all the numbers? And what number you would like to see to support your app business?

New Version of In-page Editor, Translate API and More

I’m proud to present a Get Localization June Release. It’s bigger than normally as it incorporates so many new features we’ve been cooking up for you guys. I’ll briefly introduce these features so you can get the idea what to expect. During coming days, we will provide videos and blog posts that cover these features more in detail.

This release is all about website translation. We’ve been extremely good in providing translation tools for mobile/app/client developers in the past but we felt that our offering for web developers was not that good. This is now changing as we introduce In-page Editor 2.0, a remarkable piece of technology that changes how websites are translated.

In-page Editor 2.0

We released our first prototype of In-page Editor last year June 23rd, almost exactly a year ago. We felt that there was huge potential in this technology but time just wasn’t right to go all-in with it. This is now changed, website translation is one of the key issues developers are struggling today and we want to help with that.

Insert code here


Previously our In-page editor was a bookmarklet (and it still is) but now in order to provide best possible user experience for translators we provide widget that helps you to incorporate In-page editor to your own site really easily.

It’s a small translate button in the left side of your website and clicking that allows you to start translating your site. So simple and easy. See for an example our company website and you can actually see how it works! (Some of the texts are using Cufón so they cannot be currently translated, shame on us!)

This is what you get after you click that Translate button. Editing work is happening in the page itself, here’s the screenshot of Wall Street Journal being translated to Finnish:

You can see right-away if the translation is breaking the layout or doesn’t fit to the context. After translation, the material is also available in our traditional editor as you can see from this screenshot:

With Or Without Internationalization Work

This means you can translate all the content, not just the ones that are internationalized by developers. You can upload your traditional localization files as well and translations are automatically placed to correct files while translation happens. If there’s no file available, those translations are placed in file called “Extras” and they can be then dealt with several ways, either adding the strings to original localization files or then accessing them using our new JavaScript API.

Here’s an example of Extras and PO file together:

Extras file contain all those strings that were translated with In-Page editor but were not found from django.po file.

Works with ALL Content Management Systems

You can translate all the content with In-page Editor. It works with WordPress, Sharepoint, Joomla, basically any CMS system in the market.

Get Localization Translate API

Get Localization Translate API is quite similar in architecture than famous Google Translate API. As you may know, Google Translate API is now deprecated and will move to paid model by the end of this year. API being really similar gives you an advantage to migrate easily from Google Translate API to Get Localization. Of course it won’t give you machine translation feature but it will give you an opportunity to translate your site really easily using crowdsourced or professional translators. This will definitely improve the readability and provide better experience for your users.

With Get Localization Translate API, you don’t need to use any i18n framework. You can simply use In-page editor to translate your site and with API, translations are available in similar fashion as using Google Translate API.

API documentation is available in our library: http://www.getlocalization.com/library/api/get-localization-translate-api/

Try them out, They Are Free!

We would love to hear some feedback, I know this is quite much to digest at once so we will provide videos and more information that will clarify these features in coming days. So please, send us your questions and feedback and we will try to answer them. All the features are live already today so you can try them yourself. You can find the instructions under your project “Settings” tab.  And just a friendly reminder that we reserve the right to limit your bandwidth if you go crazy so if you’re planning to use these with high traffic site, please contact us first to discuss about details.

We will also roll-out these new features to our Lingodesk product family as soon as possible. You can learn more about Lingodesk from our company website.