By Edouard on July 31, 2017
You can now translate Hugo .yml files with WebTranslateIt.
Hugo YAML files are special YAML files which are parsed in a specific way by WebTranslateIt. You can read more about it in our documentation about YAML files.
We hope you will find this new file format useful. Thank you for using WebTranslateIt.
By Estelle on July 26, 2017
After spending a few years travelling the world, Jet has decided it would be time to use his boundless knowledge and experience to help WebTranslateIt’s community to reach out to worldwide customers.
Let’s all welcome Jet for on the long and windy road to globalization, he is going to take you far far away. And fast.
By Edouard on July 26, 2017
You can now translate INNOSetup .isl files with WebTranslateIt.
INNOSetup .isl files are used to translate Windows installers. You can read more about this new file format in our documentation.
We hope you will find this new file format useful. Thank you for using WebTranslateIt.
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By Edouard on July 23, 2017
We made an update about how translation changes are attributed to people on WebTranslateIt.
Before this update, any translation change made was getting attributed to the name of the person making that change. While this is correct most of the time, it wasn’t right to say that a person translated a segment if the only thing that person did was flagging a translation as “to verify”.
From now on, instead of only tracking the person who made the last change, WebTranslateIt now tracks the name of the last translator and the name of the last proofreader and displays this information when you update a translation.
This change also now makes it possible to filter segments by last translator and last proofreader, which is useful if you want to check on the work translated by a specific translator. You will find these new filters in the filters section at the top of the translation interface.
We hope you will find these improvements useful. Thank you for using WebTranslateIt.
By Edouard on July 5, 2017
Why should you translate your application?
Because it will open your app to new markets. You will get new customers/visitors
Only 26% of the world’s Internet population understands English. By localizing your application to their languages you will therefore gain customers.
Localization only is an accelerant, though. An application currently having a poor market fit in its current market probably won’t magically work in foreign markets too. You need to already have traction in order to get more revenue. Localizing an app which has troubles finding its market niche is likely to cost you more money than you will earn.
Let’s say your software’s annual revenues are $10,000 per year. You estimate that translating your app in Chinese will open you to the Chinese market and will make your revenue grow 10% a year thanks to that.
10% of $10,000 is $1,000. Given that translating your app into Chinese cost you $1000 it might be worth spending that money into development work or marketing in order to increase revenue before thinking about localizing your application.
Now, if your software annual revenue is $100,000 a year, this is a whole different story. 10% revenue growth represents $10,000 more per year. Growing your company worldwide can be a great way to increase your revenue, at the cost of an increased complexity.
By making your application available into more languages you will increase complexity. If you regularly update your application with new feature, your development team could deploy new features whenever they were ready.
Now the development team will deploy the new feature whenever the new feature is translated and the translations tested.
If your team has more than a few developers it is likely you will need to set up a strict workflow so new features are only deployed after they are translated and so that translators can work on a stable environment where no new segments to translate creep in while they are currently working. This typically slows down a new feature release by about a week. We’ll write an article about workflows for internationalization in the future.
A few week in after having defined a proper workflow having a internationalized application will feel easier. After all with a good process in place and outsourcing the work to good companies things aren’t too difficult. But growing your organization worldwide is not only about translation work.
If you handle tech support for your app you will have to handle it in the supported languages too. It might mean hiring and training customer representatives in these new supported languages.
It might also mean to adapt your application to the local laws, secure local domain names, …
