Ever wondered about how to translate an Android app? We have wanted to translate our app, Zedge Ringtones & Wallpapers, for quiet a while, and we’ve finally started the project. In this post I’ll share what we’ve done to translate our app into 10+ languages in less than a month, only by using the community. 

The Android app is overall pretty succesfull with approximately 16 million installs and rated to 4,5 stars by 215 542 users. It’s frequently updated (by our amazingly skilled Android developers), and are the best choice for all users who want to personalize their Android phone.

At the same time we see that the competition is bigger than before, and to be ahead we wanted to try out native versions of the app. The original idea was to translate it to spanish, french and german, but soon we opened for all languages requested.

What tool did we use?

When I was first given this task I tried to search the web for a social translation tool. I didn’t know if it excisted, I didn’t know where to find it (only that Google is a good start) and I didn’t know of any others that have done the same. All from the start we knew that machine translation was something we couldn’t use, but we also knew that it could be a good tool when we had to proof read the suggested translations.

So I searched around the web, but didn’t get lucky before I asked at Twitter. Someone gave me the link to Crowdin, and I had found my tool. Crowdin is  in fact just the tool I described earlier, it allows for easy collaboration, it has a good system for proof reading (where I also can compare the suggested translation with the suggested machine translation), team members can vote for the correct translation phrases and it’s compatible with Android XML-files.

Okay, I got the tool..now what?

We’re very lucky at Zedge because we have the benefit of a strong community sourrounding the product. The first thing we did was to submit a targeted status update at our Facebook Page. The response was impressive and in 2 hours the app was 100% translated into Spanish. We did the same with German and French and had the same respons.

Then something fun happened, we started getting mails from other users that wanted to translate it into new languages. Shortly it was translated into Russian and Finnish and we eventually decided it was just easier to launch it for all users. One Facebook post later we had opened for 30+ languages and according to Bitly’s statistic we’ve had people from 69 countries visiting our translation page.

According to Bitly’s statistics we’ve had people from 69 countries visiting our translation page

And now I got the people..?

So now we’ve had help from lots of users and lots of languages are 100% translated. But before we offer the translated version out to the public we want to proof read the phrases. For the easiest proof read it’s essensial that you have a lot of users that have voted for the correct translation. If a phrase get lots of votes you’re almost guarranteed that it’s correct. If it got few, you just have to compare it to the translation suggested by either Microsoft or Google (Both are built into Crowdin).

Congrats, you have translated your Android App ( with help from the community!). Our app will be launched in local languages later this autumn/winter.