This is regarding android application.
As per my analysis, the translation from Google translate is not perfect.
Will it be ok show non-english users a dialog with the following content:
This application has been translated by using Google Translate and
hence could have translation issues. If you see translation problems
in your language, please switch to English locale on your device. If
possible, help us in fixing language translation problems noticed by
you
This question is from the perspective to quality and usability of app by non-english speakers who have set the locale as non-english on their android device.
I would try to find somebody that can translate it into proper English.
Expensive: Supertext
Cheap: MyGengo
But even the cheapest MyGengo translations are normally better than Google. If you app is something professional, I would invest into a real professional translation. Otherwise your usability goes down the drain.
Related
I'm using the ML Kit translator currently with English to Polish. I know the docs say it should be used for casual words and translation, but its returning basic things like Monkey and Spark back as English words, does anyone know what could be happening?
As you might have noticed by yourself reading the Google documentation, this API is not intended for long and complex texts to translate. That being said if the length of your context to translate is quite long, a weird translation is just a normal output to expect.
If you require higher fidelity, you should use the Cloud Translation API.
Also, I suggest you always translate to and from English because when you translate between non-English languages, the translation's quality can be poor.
I want to know whether it is possible to translate any android application in any language.
Like all application is in English language can it is possible or any API available to convert it into other language.
Let's say example like in setting menu we have Wi-fi,Bluetooth,Call Setting,about phone etc.are in english language. so with the help of any translator can we convert it into any language?
I already go through this link http://android-developers.blogspot.in/2013/03/native-rtl-support-in-android-42.html
To translate an application to another language you need a human translator, that is, a human being knowing what the application does, knowing the target language, knowing the rules of translation to the target language (*), and preferably knowing the language that the application was originally developed in.
(*) For example, Polish software always says "thou, do this!" because otherwise it would have to know who is reading the text: a man, a woman, several women, or several persons including at least one man. Your translator must follow common practice for the target language (for example, it would be wrong to re-phrase Polish to use nouns instead of verbs).
If you have a human translator, you can translate the application. First, make sure that no user-visible text is hard-coded, and no phrases are composed programmatically. Then, you just let the translator translate the resources. Resources for different languages will reside in different directories of your project. But the translator must know the context of each phrase, know what the application does before showing a message and what it will do after a menu item is chosen. If the translation is poor, a native speaker may get puzzled and will never choose the menu item that he/she is looking for.
There are companies specializing in app UI translation. They will want your money and you will not be able to evaluate the quality of their job by yourself, but probably this is the best you can do. (PS do not forget to ask them what happens if you change/add one or two messages.)
This might help:
Google translate api:
https://developers.google.com/api-client-library/java/apis/translate/v2
I am a android game publisher on Google play. I usually use Google translate to translate my store listing text into multi-language. I write the source text by hand and then use GG translate. When I meet something like English (US) - English(UK), Spanish(Spanish) - Spanish(US).... I know US Spanish is a little different form Spanish Spanish, but it's 90% similar so I accept the different. In google translate, it's have only Spanish, so I used that Spanish version for both Spanish(Spanish) - Spanish(US) in my store listing. It seem to be too time consuming. Can I just use Spanish (Spanish) in my store-listing and don't add translation for Spanish(US)? If a customer who using Spanish US, can he see my store listing text in Spanish? Say another way, does it necessary for add many translations for one language (Spanish/ Portuguese) but for many country (Spanish, US, Brazil,...)?
Translation is not necessary. But it makes your app user friendly. I think in your case it fine to simplify translation.
As a user I'm dislike applications which use low quality translations by Google Translate to my native language (Russian) and seams like not check result. It looks ugly. Correct English it's even better than bad translation.
I have the patience to convert my strings.xml file and my HTML help files to other languages using Google Translation Toolkit.
However, the translations are not "100%" correct.
I speak German as well as English so used the Eng -> Ger translation for my strings.xml etc.
Some of the "gaffs" made by the translator were pretty bad.
So, is it better to have 1 language done well (ie English) or to also provide multi language support but for languages I have no idea about whatsoever.
I wanted to cover the "big boys" too such as Mandarin, Hindi, Japanese, Russian, etc but am worrying bad translations would make my app seem to be of a low quality.
Has anybody any experience and words of advice on the topic.
Many thanks.
Paul.
You should probably hire translator(s) which are very good at the English and target foreign language(s).
One of the most important things is that translator must understand usage, concepts and conventions of your application - know it and understand it. Otherwise, you will end up with grammatically correct but meaningless translations in context of your app - I can see this in a lot of cases since my native language is not English.
And, yes, your app will look "low quality" and "hostile" to SOME people if it has translations that are missing the point.
German and English belong to the same language family and Google has ample data for both. Any other language, especially those that are linguistically a lot more distant (Chinese, Japanese, Hindi), is translated even worse than German. I do not believe that native speakers of these languages can get ANY value out of a machine translation.
Using a machine translation shows your foreign customers exactly how much value you place on them: none.
Wow !.
It looks like a thumbs down then.
Like all things in life I suppose "compromise" is the winner.
My app basically has a single setup screen with about 15 strings and a few radio buttons, check boxes etc.
The games themselves are pretty obvious but underating the "gist" is better than no understanding at all.
I'll focus on getting the strings for the setup page "perfect" and add the HTML "help" screen translations with fingures crossed.
I am of the view that is one goes to a country one should at leasr learn some of the language. My experience is that the "natives" appreciate an "attempt to speak theor tongue" rather than simply assuming "they" should understand English. By the same philosophy, if the "main" points are translated well, I should at least earn a few more points for "having a go to respect their language and culture" by going through the translation process of "all supplied help text".
As I say, it is a tricky area to know what to do. If my app did take off I would not hesitate to have professional translations done but the initial outlay price for, say, 20 translations could well wipe out any return. In 2 months I'll be older and wiser (if only in expletives from people who are insulted by the translations).
I'd love to hear any other responses from people who have had the same dilemma and to know their real life "app" experiences in this area.
A genuine thankyou to those who have so far written..
Paul
If your app is targeted at people who know english (geeks, system administrators, other computer people) then you better use english only UI.
Other way, if you target "common" audience you have to decide what do you want - bigger "client base" or higher app rating (because no annoyed people will rate your app 1 star because of bad l10n).
I'm russian myself and I can tell you that for me badly localized app is much more annoying than english app. But people who does not know english (there are a lot of them) will never install english-only app.
I want to translate language into another language but the Google API was shut off. Is there any alternative way to translate the language??
You can also try this app: http://www.pedrorainho.eu/applications/apktranslator
It was done by me to translate my android apps, and uses bing
If you mean embedding machine translation in your page, it’s still possible using Google services, either width the paid service Google Translate API v2 or using Google Website Translator suitably. Regarding the latter, see the simple demo page
http://www.bytelevelbooks.com/code/javascript/transinput.html
(about translating user input). There’s a discussion of the topic in my book Going Global with JavaScript and Globalize.js, with some notes on the alternatives and pitfalls. Generally, automatic translation may work reasonably for sentences of very simple grammatical structure, so it might be feasible a) for generated texts planned to be translatable that way, b) for user input in situations where the user knows the target language somewhat (e.g., reads reasonably but writes poorly), so that he has some chances of checking that the translations make sense.
You can try Bing API at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd877832.aspx