Localizing your app's metadata (keywords, description and screenshots) is the easiest way to increase your downloads, and should be done as soon as you have optimised your keywords. David Janner managed to 7x his downloads by localizing his app. 

On the image below, you'll see how our downloads increased in France after we localized one of our previous kids apps for French.

It's not unusual that we see a 50-100% increase in downloads in every market we localize our apps for.

Why?

Because people around the world don’t search for music on the App Store, they search for musique, музыка or 音乐.  Additionally, these keywords will be far less competitive, so you’ll rank higher for local keywords than for the English ones.

Plus, with a localized description and screenshots, you'll achieve a better conversion rate once the users have landed on your App Store page.

Over a billion Chinese people doesn't speak english. Which screenshot do you think gives the best conversion rate in the Chinese App Store?

In this article, we'll tell you how to get a good localization for 300 USD, while spending as little time as possible. If you're quick, you'll spend no more than 3 hours on the process.

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Below is a list of the languages you'll get your app's metadata translated into if you follow our tips. They are the most important ones, based upon our experience.

• French

• Spanish

• Russian

• Italian

• Japanese 

• Simplified Chinese

• Portuguese

• German

Key translator qualities

The crucial part of localizing your app is finding good translators. With “good”, I mean translators who enhance these key qualities:

• Search marketing skills

• Solid language skills

• Reasonable pricing

• Quick response time

We use Odesk to find translators. However, there are a lot more bad ones than good ones out there, so it’s quite time consuming affair to identify the promising candidates. 

Our preferred translators

So in order to save you a couple of days of work, we might as well share our preferred translators with you. These people have all been thoroughly screened by us, before we trusted them to do the Disco Fingers localization.  

They have all good marketing, language and communication skills. Plus, they work quickly, so it shouldn't cost you more than 300 USD in total.

French - Matthieu Graux

Spanish - Ignacio Muñoz Guillen

Italian - Mariaconcetta Sampugnaro

Japanese - Mari Sakamoto

Portuguese - Roberta Abreu

Simplified Chinese - Lili Zheng

Russian - Irina Gorbachova

German - Harald Flamann

The process

1. Sign up at Odesk (or some other site where they have profiles...)

2. Create a generic “Localize app metadata” job post, like the one in the image below. Choose hourly rate.

3. Contact all the translators. Use the generic job post create above to invite the to an interview. Once they accept, hire them, and limit their work to three hours per week. That should be enough. 

4. Once they accept the job, send them a document with the metadata you want translated. Plus additional info (i.e. promo codes, app previews).

5. Wait a couple of days and receive the translated text.

6. Upload to iTunes Connect together with an app update.  

7. See your downloads sky rocket! :)

I strongly urge you to send as much info as possible about your app to the translators, as it will make the job easier for them and cheaper for you, while also giving you a better result. 

If you find other good translators, or have tips for doing this process even faster and cheaper, feel free to mention it as a comment and I'll consider updating the article.

Good luck!

Per Harald Borgen

CEO