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| Why? |
Chinese mobile phone users number over 520 million—more than double the number in the U.S. By the end of 2010, that number will reach 600 million. In the U.S, the penetration rate for the cell phone market is around 75%. But, because of multiple cell phones per user, that rate exceeds 100% in Japan, Hong Kong, and Western Europe.
By choice, more than 20% of all European mobile phone users have two phones: one for work, one private. Some use one for calling and one for texting, or one for local and one for long distance, and so on. And developing areas such as India, Africa and Latin America have shown startling growth in cell phone use in recent years. |
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And this means….
Your profits are significantly reduced if you are not localized to European, African, Asian, Middle-Eastern, and Latin American languages. In short, mobile phone adoption is a hotbed of commercial potential on the global landscape.
If you are English-only . . .
You face serious obstacles to expanding to other languages effectively. Your competitors, tuned to the multilingual market, will leave you far behind—both in terms of international acceptance and profits. Sadly, like many developers, you may still be "English-centric." Moving to a multilingual platform wasn’t part of your plan. But in the wireless world marketplace, it makes the most sense to think globally now.
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| How can SEMNation help me here? |
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Multilingual Design |
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We help you design your app with multilingual capabilities in mind. This means addressing underlying structure in order to support multiple languages. When the structure is in place, adding new languages is relatively simple. |
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Language Recognition and Language Choice |
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We look at the key choice points: How will the application determine the language? Can the user switch, or will language choice be automatic? |
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Externalizing the Text |
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This means that all translatable text is not "hard-coded" in your application, allowing the app to pull translations from a language resource file. |
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Text Display |
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Does your app handle Asian characters? What fonts and font sizes do you support? Are you avoiding font sizes affected by pixel-dropping in Asian languages? |
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User Interface: Cultural Assumptions |
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Is your user interface appropriate to the cultures that you support? This means attention to not only representations of calendars, dates, times, numbers, names, and so on, but also to culturally-linked variables such as color, look and feel, and language “style.” (English has a flow and structure that differs from many other languages.) |
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Accessibility |
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Does your application accommodate the hearing and/or sight-impaired? Like many countries, the US government has accessibility requirements in respect to government use. These are referred to as "Section 508" -- see http://www.section508.gov/index.cfm?FuseAction=Content&ID=3). To read an overview of the accessibility requirements of other countries, see http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gap/laws.html. |
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Icons/Images |
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Are your icons and images culturally inappropriate? And are your function icons globally accepted? Are you aware of issues around "hand" symbols? Most hand or arm symbols may be seen as innocent in one culture but viewed as obscene in others. And are there “tooltips” for all your icons? |
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Pseudo-Localization |
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Words translated from English are often much longer in other languages. For example, "Change" in English could become "Anderung" in German, or "Account Settings" might turn into "expliquer des cadres" in French. “Pseudo-localization” is a process of determining if there are "text-expansion" issues with other languages. It will also address text-display (font) variables. Space and text display issues are of particular relevance given the small "footprint" of mobile computing. |
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Key Functions and Keypad Layout |
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English speakers are familiar with the question mark, exclamation point, double quote, period, ampersand, and dollar sign, and so on. But these characters are not universal. Spanish may require "¿" and "¡". And German and French use double quotes, accents, umlauts, and so on. These characters can be critical to understanding what’s presented on the screen. |
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Documentation and the Actual User Interface |
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Users hate it when the documentation is not consistent with the actual interface. If you have this problem in English, you’ll have it in other languages as well. |
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Multilingual Support |
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It’s not just your application. Your website, email support, FAQs, and phone support must also have multilingual capability, and these must be concurrent with your software release. This takes planning. |
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SEMNation has developed over [number] of its own applications into the global marketplace over the past [number] years. We’ve “walked the walk,” and are uniquely qualified to help new developers do the same.
Call or email right now.
Phone
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1-800-555-4576
Email - sales@mobilesoftwaremarketing.com |
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