Smartphones are quickly becoming the only Internet-connected device global customers are using to research and buy products and services. In established and emerging markets alike, mobile apps have become the primary way many customers interact with brands.
Adapting to this reality is essential for your business. Companies that ignore the mobile-first phenomenon face major risks, including:
- Losing your customers’ attention and interest
- Losing conversions and revenue
- Losing the trust of current or potential customers
This is especially true in global markets, where mobile-first customers not only expect a great user experience on their devices of choice—they expect it to be in their preferred languages, too.
Are you serving your global markets with translated mobile apps? Read on to learn how MotionPoint is uniquely positioned to translate content for your tech-savvy global customers.
How Different Mobile Apps Handle Content
Localizing your mobile content can increase your app’s discoverability in regional app stores, and illustrates your brand’s commitment to global customer needs. This can pay off in the form of higher international brand awareness, conversions and revenue.
But localizing your mobile app requires linguists to access its translatable content, such as text, images, video and other material (like PDFs).
Mobile apps come in three primary forms. Each of handles content a bit differently:
Native apps: A native app’s translatable content is embedded within the app itself; it can’t be accessed from the web. These apps provide fast performance, consistency in UX and are able to readily access the device’s hardware and other features. Content updates require end user interaction if automatic updating is disabled for the application on their device.
HTML5 apps: These are essentially “shortcuts” on the device that present a mobile-friendly version of a website using HTML5, JavaScript, CSS or other standard web technologies. This “write once, run anywhere” approach ensures cross-platform functionality.
Hybrid apps: These apps allow for HTML5 content to be embedded within the native app. This content can be dynamically updated within a static container, which can then take advantage of access to the device’s hardware and other features.
MotionPoint’s Approach to Mobile Content Translation
MotionPoint’s website and digital-content translation solution can localize mobile content for native, HTML5 and hybrid apps. It’s also flexible enough to effectively translate both native and web-based material.
MotionPoint’s solution offers:
- Once-and-for-all translations: Once MotionPoint’s linguists translate a word or phrase, it’s stored in a translation memory database where it can be used again and again at no additional charge. Considering how much content often overlaps between websites and mobile apps, this can generate significant translation savings.
- Thorough quality assurance: MotionPoint’s comprehensive translation and editorial process continues throughout the life of the project. We continually audit the work of our linguists and technologies to ensure flawless translations and performance.
- Effortless technical tools: Our technology is designed to run independently of your CMS or other platforms, allowing it to seamlessly operate without the need for connectors, plugins or other risky technical workarounds that can cause headaches and delays.
How MotionPoint Eases Mobile Content Collection, Translation & Deployment
Just as with its website translation projects, MotionPoint offers customers a mobile translation solution that eases the burden on their IT, marketing and other teams while achieving a peerless efficiency of scale. Here’s how we do it:
Content Collection
MotionPoint’s solution collects content from your mobile app and automatically routes it for immediate translation. Content that’s natively embedded within an mobile app can be shared with MotionPoint for translation in two ways:
- MotionPoint’s Web Service offers you the ability to make real-time programmatic calls to retrieve content in XML, HTML, JSON or plain text formats. This provides you with the flexibility to design your own process to translate mobile content in a way that fits your needs. It takes advantage of the business and financial benefits of translation memory, which maximizes the value of existing translated content while minimizing costs.
- TranSend, a feature of our MotionPortal™ online customer service ticketing system, enables you to submit content for translation via static HTML, XML, JSON, plain text or other file formats. Once the material is translated, you can retrieve it and load it yourself into your back-end system.
MotionPoint’s standard proxy-based translation solution can also process HTML5-based content pulled from external sources. It displays the translated content within the localized version of the app.
Content Translation
MotionPoint translations are performed by dedicated translation teams that work with you throughout the life of your project. They include:
- Certified linguists who are native speakers of your target markets’ languages, as well as experts in your industry
- Proofreaders who ensure translation accuracy
- Editors who ensure the original intent and meaning of your source material is preserved
- Quality control editors who ensure brand voice is represented authentically and accurately
To ensure world-class and consistent translations, the team works with you to create a translation glossary and style guide that accurately represent your brand’s voice, contains localized brand-specific terms and more. All translations are created within MotionPoint’s “live view” software, allowing our linguists to see how your localized content will appear on-site before it’s deployed.
This combination of industry-leading technology, expertise and resources create translations that are authentic, accurate and customized specifically for each market.
Content Deployment
After the collected content has been translated, it’s delivered for customers to publish within their mobile apps.
For native content, customers can use MotionPoint Web Services to design their preferred delivery system, or use TranSend to retrieve content which can be loaded into their back-end systems.
When translated HTML5 content is ready for deployment, MotionPoint utilizes a proprietary website language layering technology to present the translated content within the localized app, in place of its original content.
This language layering process is transparent to the customer’s back-end architecture. It supports both static and dynamic pages, and graphics. When global users navigate an HTML5-powered mobile experience, translated content is layered “on the fly” for every page they visit, delivering the appropriate content in their preferred language.
The entire process of redirecting the HTML stream to MotionPoint’s translation server, and the translated stream being presented to the end-user happens behind the scenes, instantly.
Conclusion
For companies seeking to successfully conduct business around the world, translating their mobile apps is no longer a “nice to have.” It’s mission-critical.
MotionPoint’s translation solution enables companies in any industry to localize their apps in any language, for any market. Our mix of human expertise and technical capabilities offers customers the ability to seamlessly manage their mobile content and reach global customers on their devices of choice—in their language of choice.
Take a Deeper Dive
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