High quality and meticulously researched work. Sara is a pleasure to work with. She is friendly, reliable and highly professional.
Kornél M., Private Client (Hungary)
The market of mobile applications is growing phenomenally year after year. Occasionally I find myself browsing some quite popular apps on several mobile device operating systems and I read more and more comments asking for their Italian version. Although English is widely used in a variety of contexts and an increasing number of non-English speakers can read and understand it at least at its most basic level, the convenience to play a game or use an app in one’s native language is incomparable. I can’t argue with that! Moreover, it is worth to say that localising an app into another language plays a huge role for entering into new markets and increasing popularity – and earnings.
My experience with translating this web and mobile app of a new social platform has been great. Despite someone could think it has a slightly macabre aftertaste, I believe it’s a great opportunity to save moments and memories of life and share them with people browsing in the future, maybe our great granchildren! It’s like a modern version of those cardboard boxes where our grandparents used to store all our objects and that we had the chance to open years and years later.
Going back to the app Italian translation, as I wrote when I translated other mobile games such as Arma Mobile Ops and Gunman Taco Truck, string length limitation challenges are always around the corner. English uses short, punchy sentences which always provide a brilliant effect, but unfortunately not all the languages work the same.
The other reason why I found this text challenging is that I translated it starting from a translation, as the main language of the software was not English. In this kind of situation, it is very easy to spot sentences or words whose meaning is quite literal or in general not very clear. In fact, most of the time it is required to work only on the extracted strings without seeing the effective context in which they will be used.
Moreover, when the main, original language of the text is an unknown foreign language to the translator, it can be harder trying to solve the problem at its roots. In similar cases, it is good practice to contact the client or the translator straight away in order to get more information about the word or the sentence intended meaning.