If you own a smart phone (Blackberry, iPhone, Droid, etc.), chances are you not only know what an app is, but you have downloaded one, two, or even dozens. Want to find a place for Sushi in New York, there's a mobile application for that! How about a speech recognition Mandarin translation tool for your next trip to China? Yep, there's an app for that, too!

Mobile applications are developed for handheld devices such as personal digital assistants or mobile phones. They are either pre-installed during manufacturing, or downloaded by customers from app stores. Mobile phone applications (apps) are exploding, in terms of quantity and popularity, and marketing and development teams are responding.

According to an independent study commissioned by GetJar, an app marketplace and rival to Apple's App store, downloads of applications could increase to almost 50 billion by 2012 from about 7 billion in 2009. If you develop your mobile application for English-readers/speakers only, you could be missing out on huge numbers of downloads.

Here's why: The United States is not the leader in the use of mobile technology services. Currently there are over 520 million Chinese mobile phone users, that's more than double the number of users in the U.S., and China is projected to reach 600 million in 2010. In addition, the GetJar study estimates that Asia is leading in the total number of mobile app downloads, with 37 percent.

Preparing for New Markets
Localization is the preparation of locale-specific versions of a software application, electronic document, internet resource, or, in this case, mobile application. It consists of the translation of material into the language and culture of the target market. The problem is that many companies do not understand how to prepare their products, documents, and interfaces for distribution in other markets. To localize a mobile application goes beyond translating textual content into the language of its users.

Here are some considerations multilingual mobile app developers face:

• Text Display: The complexities of localization and properly adapting the product to the local market are numerous and include text-expansion, or dialog resizing, correct text selection, and translation accuracy. For example, can Asian characters be displayed properly?
• Internationalization: Internationalization is an engineering process that precedes localization. Internationalized code is written to ensure that the date/times, currency, numbers, page formats, fonts, user interface, etc., all work in the new local market. Its aim is to make subsequent localization and translation more efficient. Keep in mind different representations of dates, times, numbers, names, addresses, and calendars.
• Culturally Appropriate: Are there any culturally inappropriate icons/images? Are you using the globally accepted icons for functions?
• Pseudo-Localization: When English is translated, the translated words are often significantly longer. Pseudo-localization is the term for determining if there are "text-expansion" issues with other languages. This is particularly important with the small mobile screen.
• Questionable Characters: Spanish will require "¿" and "¡". German and French have upper/lower double quotes or chevrons.

There's an App for That?
And, now for a little fun... back in our November 2009 issue of Global Communicator, we told you about the social media tools available for cooking turkeys on Thanksgiving. Since this issue focuses on the huge growth of mobile apps globally, here are some multilingual and global-centric apps you might find useful:

• StudySets - Translation: Powered by Google's rich translation API, StudySets - Translation provides instant translations for over 30 different languages. It is free and contains no commercial advertisements.


• World Nomads: Have you ever been stuck in a country wanting to be polite but having no idea how to even say 'please' or 'thank you'? Download the World Nomad Apps in 20 different languages including Mandarin, Spanish, Indonesian, French, Japanese, Italian, Thai, Hindi, Lao, Arabic, Malay, Russian, and German.


• Travel Genius: How often have you been out traveling and need something (a taxi ride, dry cleaning, or gas)? Travel Genius is a location based search tool that helps you to quickly find and get to the places or services you need when you are out and about. It combines the best features of a GPS tool with powerful Internet search options and puts them into a simple user interface that works on any BlackBerry smart phone.


• Travel Interpreter: An app that adds to the tools you may need for international travel - giving you access to many of the key phrases you may need. Most likely the language you are looking for will be here, as choices include Spanish, French, Chinese, Arabic, and Italian (23 in total). Unlike many other apps for travel-related translations, this one has a picture to go with the audio component.


• Dragon Dictation 2.0: You can speak to tweet or update your Facebook page with this speech recognition mobile application. How is that for smart?

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