Dear mobile apps devs,

No one's gonna hate you if you do not provide a multilingual support. Just, please, stop using Google Translate and force the app's language to the phone system's. It's just dumb

Sincerely,
A non native english speaker

@F1973 Some apps I downloaded / updated got their app language set to my native language, but you could smell from miles it was an automatic translation by how poor the it was. Ranged from just a word or expression that should not be used in the context to the whole sentence making absolutely no sense

If you were about to use automatic translation for your app, you better not, especially using Google Translate. Better not do something than execute it awfully, especially if you push it to the front.

A better approach if you're working in the open source (even closed source is fine I think?) is to let native speakers help you translate on platforms such as Crowdin. This will work if you really have a motivated contributor / fan base you can trust.

@F1973 But if you don't want to ask anyone to translate but still want to have a better language support, use better services (I heard DeepL isn't bad), even paid if necessary.

And if the translation quality isn't high for your solution but you want it so bad, set english language as default and put your languages in some easily accessible settings while mentioning somewhere it's automatic therefore it could be inaccurate, but for the love of God DON'T force it based on system's language

@F1973 No problem, glad I could help :)

@CodeTalker DeepL is definitely way better. Ditched Google Translate years ago in favor of this one

@F1973 it’s just a fucking stupid idea. It’s not much to let a company approve the translations, there are many websites who offer cheap freelancers for this.

Ideally, they even allow you to provide contexts, such as screenshots of your app.

@F1973 that’s what those website should bridge, an easy for you, easy for them “automated” way to translate.

They are commonly paid per translation and not per project, so you won’t always get the same translator

@F1973 Of course. But the translators can and usually are also rated. Sadly, I don’t know which site I’ve looked into.

I think that site in particular even allowed to reject certain translation if you get bad feedback from your users.

I’ll put much more stress on a language selector, don’t force on me native language, let me just select English. You just taking me out of my safe space, which leads to an app deletion.

It applies to content delivery process. I understand, that most companies (media and such) want to adapt content to a given country. Locking options only to the “adapted version”.

Some will claim — it’s piracy measurement. Well, this method got its false positives, cuz a lot of people want to access content in the original state

Agree, sometimes Google translate is not reliable

🤔 Never realized this. I should have a language picker on my apps...
🤔

Sorry 🙏🏻 😂

Apps without language pickers genuinely make my blood BOIL more than websites with autoplay videos. Ugh.