After few months of frustration with trying to use the "de-facto" internationalization library for Vue.js - vue-i18n, I've decided it is time to replace it. And that is why I have created fluent-vue - a Vue.js internationalization plugin that uses Mozilla's Fluent syntax to allow for natural-sounding translations.
In this post, I try to explain what problems I have encountered when trying to use vue-i18n library in my app, and how Fluent syntax solves them.
Did you know that 72.1% of Internet users prefer to dwell on websites translated in their native language? That’s a lot of people.
But that’s fine. You see, with today’s technologies you can translate your text into any language you choose. “Okay, so what?” — well, people who browse products described in their native tongue tend to trust those seller companies more.
So, by localizing your content, you can tremendously increase the number of your clients, sales, and, of course, grow your business. And the truth is that the localization industry is also evolving along with other digital businesses.
To prove it, we at Alconost have researched and listed the top 5 localization trends you can take advantage of in 2020. Let’s dive in!
How do we know when a product is solving a significant problem in a growing market? Do we need to build a brand and defend it with barriers against competitors? Read further in this article.
Notes on Des Traynor’s talk from Web Summit on developing a product strategy based on his experience at Intercom. The original article has been written by Vit Myshlaev and translated by Alconost.
If you can’t answer in the affirmative to the below three questions regarding your product, it makes no sense to move forward:
The new year means new plans and new prospects. And if you were considering localizing your product last year, it might be the right time to take action instead of postponing it indefinitely.
That’s why we at Alconost have prepared a list of free e-learning resources that are sure to help explore the topic of localization and ultimately equip you to manage the whole process on your own. We use some of these courses for our internal training, and we hope you like them, too.
We’ve arranged the e-learning resources in an order that consecutively mirrors the localization process. We recommend that you go down the list step by step for best results.
This article explores the basic concepts behind character encoding and then takes a dive deeper into the technical details of encoding systems.
If you have just a basic knowledge of character encoding and want to better understand the essentials, the differences between encoding systems, why we sometimes end up with nonsense text, and the principles behind different encoding system architecture, then read on.
Getting to understand character encoding in detail requires some extensive reading and a good chunk of time. I’ve tried to save you some of that effort by bringing it all together in one place while providing what I believe to be a pretty thorough background of the topic.
I’m going to go over how single-byte encodings (ASCII, Windows-1251 etc.) work, the history of how Unicode came to be, the Unicode-based encodings UTF-8, UTF-16 and how they differ, the specific features, compatibility, and lack thereof among various encodings, character encoding principles, and a practical guide to how characters are encoded and decoded.
We've developed a unified four-layer model for app promotion and added our recommendations.
Before we wrote this article we had our apps downloaded over two million times, ran about 50 large promotional campaigns, and made it onto the App Store top-lists in over 24 countries to finally combine all of it into a single workflow.
You won’t find almost any obvious stuff about keywords, nice-looking icons, screenshots, or ad campaigns in this article. We’ve tried to develop a unified model for a product-focused company based on our experience by answering the questions “What? When? Why?” and even “And what then?”
If you’re developing your own app, want to start developing one, or just have a friend who’s a developer or marketing professional at a product-focused company, you’ll find lots of useful information in this article.
With the Asian market rapidly growing, almost every ambitious IT product sooner or later faces the challenge of localization for this region. And without knowing all its facets any localization project is rather doomed to fail. That’s why we at Alconost have decided to translate and share with you the article on localizing games for Asia by Plarium, a global game developer with solid experience in game localization. We found here some useful approaches that are also valid for our localization projects and hope that you’ll like the reading, too.
For Western developers, entering the Asian market is like entering outer space, only 30 megabytes heavier. Localizing games into Japanese, Chinese, and Korean requires a Herculean effort. You need to account for certain technical requirements and scrupulously research the market and the target audience’s mindset. But if this is your dream, keep reading — our experience should stand you in good stead.
Setting up the content localization and, thus, configuring the interface language of the product in such a way that the right language is rendered to the right user is extremely important for each digital platform. That’s why we have decided to translate and share with you this expert article by Nicolai Goshin from Hellicht Medien.
And we strongly hope that some strategic points would be valuable for your localization projects!
Digital projects targeting audiences in different countries or different language areas are doomed to take advantage of localization strategies. So we must answer the following question: which users should be given which content in which languages? The question at the first sight seems simple. But later in this article we will point out why this topic is, in fact, complex. And, of course, we will also address how to deal with this complexity.
Let's assume a scenario in which content (for example, an online magazine) is available in three languages: German, English, and Arabic. The goal is ideally to provide content to each user in their native language. If this is not possible, the content should be provided to the user in the language that they best understand apart from their mother tongue.
In 2017 tinyBuild released Streets of Rogue, a unique visual successor to the hit game Punch Club. Streets of Rogue is remarkable for the variety of its game features and genre elements. The developers combined an intense top-down roguelike, a retro pixel art style, an atmosphere of irrepressible excitement, classic character levelling, and questing. The game revolves around playing through a series of randomly generated cities. This can be accomplished via brute force, stealth, or hacking — it’s up to you!
Streets of Rogue quickly garnered a warm reception from gamers and the press alike, so tinyBuild naturally decided to bring the game to a wider international audience.
According to predictions of the analytical platform App Annie, interest in mobile apps will enjoy stable growth over the next four years. So, if you’re considering bringing your app to new markets, this is the time to do it.
During my two years as the localization manager, I came to understand that localization has its own rules, and knowing them can help you adapt any product for a new market quickly and competently. These principles will be useful for anyone who wants to localize an app but doesn’t know where to start.
Start with the most important thing: figuring out which languages you need to localize your app into and determining whether or not localization is justified at all.
Here’s an example from my experience: Israel isn't a high-priority market for Badoo, but the app is localized into modern Hebrew. Moreover, only 6% of Israeli Badoo users actually run the app in Hebrew (as a comparison, 62.5% of Israeli users speak English). In this particular case, localization is justified even with these statistics, but a similar situation could represent a losing proposition for your app. So, study your market.
