I'm doing a little research about this subject. It's for my blog. So, I'm looking for some experiences about this.
I have the "user's side" of the story, I think they want it better if it's on Spanish. But, what about the programmers? Do you make your programs multi-language? Why? Why not? Are you ok with paying somebody to translate your app or you prefer doing it yourselves? Is the benefit bigger than the costs?
Thanks!
It depends on the use case. When writing a LOB application, I use resource files, satellite assemblies etc. to be sure to keep the portions of the user interface that could be potential localization targets out of my code. You don't really want to hardcode your text into your source code.
In my case, most of the time it is not an issue, I'm doing mostly custom development for clients. It's a completely different story for mobile apps, though - you just upload them to the app store, not knowing who will buy and use them, so there, providing localization sure is an issue. Seeing as it's not really hard to do (i.e. the effort involved in loading strings etc. from resources vs. hardcoding them), the benefits outweigh the costs IMHO. I have no hard marketing facts about this, but I know by experience that translating an application to Chinese opened up a whole new market for us, whereas before we had thought English to be absolute sufficient - turned out we were wrong in that regard.
As for the DIY thing: Don't do it, unless you are very proficient in the language in question. It seems this is kinda obvious, but you always encounter poor translations in applications, and this really takes away th professional feel of the app. Just my 2 cent.
In the iPhone videos: http://www.eng.utah.edu/~cs4962/schedule.html they talk about this, and give some advice on it. Basically the advice is Yes convert to another language, and you can probably find a student at a school willing to do the translations very cheap.
You also have to look at the "huge" Spanish speaking population in the world. I may have a bias as I live In Texas and 1/2 the radio, tv stations are in Spanish, I would defiantly translate my apps into Spanish, along with several other languages.
The languages that they mentioned in the videos that converted the best for them were Japanese, Italian, Spanish, and Russian.
If you need to go on the cheap, you can always use Google Translate to translate your text, and then ask your uses for grammar fixes, people like interacting, and feeling like they made a difference.
It's also relatively easy to add multi-language support to an iPhone. Here's some information on localizing your iPhone appl http://www.icanlocalize.com/site/tutorials/iphone-applications-localization-guide/
I'm sure you can find similar things for Android.
-Brad
I would definitely give it a try. In Spain, not many people are proficient in English, so if you want to sell in this market, translation is a must. In my experience, selling to the Spanish speaking market (basically Spain an Mexico) is harder than the USA, but considering that the cost for localizing an iPhone shouldn't be to high, it's worth trying.
Just make sure you get yourself a translator that is computer literate.
Google Trends is a great tool to determine the size of your non-english market.
http://www.google.com/trends?q=tumblr&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all&sort=0
If you're writing a Tumblr app, having it translated into Filipino and Malay would probably be worthwhile.