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How to Build Multilingual Web Apps?

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franko nick

Many development teams launch smart and innovative web apps that have a practically universal target audience, but how far can they really reach? If you start your web app as a single language platform, you will only be able to capture a tiny portion of your potential user base

If you really want to tap into the limitless potential of a global audience, you shouldn’t stop at one or even a couple of languages. 

There are three main ways web design and development services teams can launch multilingual web apps on the global market:

  1. Baby Steps: You start from the most basic level – translate only the app description, which can also be a quick test for the app’s potential. It’s possible that potential users of your app in Japan don’t even know it exists because they simply don’t search in English. Keep in mind that you should optimize the app title and its description, as well as keywords that should be based on local language search trends.
  2. Internationalization: The term internationalization implies design and development of an app in a way that enables simple localization for target markets. This means extracting images and texts from the app code, enabling localized content integration, dynamic content and user-generated content regardless of the location.
  3. Full Localization: Localization is the adaption of the web app’s content to specific linguistic and cultural demands of the target market. This includes an adaptation of numerical, dates, time and currency, symbols, icons, colors, text and visuals.

Multilingual Support

After you’re done developing your multilingual app, you have happy users from all over the world, business is booming, and the next thing you know – someone contacts you in their native language. And why shouldn’t they? You have perfectly worded content in their language and they expect they can address your team in the same language as well. 

Depending on your resources and preferences, you can choose some of the following options for web app support:

  • Full Spectrum of Languages Support: obviously, this option is by far the most expensive and can truly burn a hole in your budget. At the same time, it’s the most professional and user-friendly because you will really be able to interact with your users in their native language, which potential customers will see as a huge plus. Usually, only big software companies with huge budgets opt for this option.
  • On-Demand Language Support: the compromise between full multilingual support and cheaper options is to find support agents only when there’s a demand for it. For example, if you get two support tickets in Arabic each month, it’s definitely not cost-effective to hire a support employee just for that. Rather, if you have a base of support staff who’s available on-demand and paid by the hour, you can save a bunch on support compared to the first option.
  • Major Languages Support: you will often see this option in web apps. Even though they present their content in dozens of different languages, they will only offer support in a couple of them, according to their analysis of customer needs. Usually, they focus only on major world languages such as English, Spanish, French, Chinese, etc. This is another step down from full language support, but it’s dramatically cheaper. 
  • Chatbots: for multilingual apps, this is by far the cheapest option, but of course it has the lowest quality (you really get what you pay for). For some users, it can be a good way to quickly solve some of the simpler issues they have with the app, while for some it can be incredibly frustrating. You have to decide whether you want to take this risk.

 

 

 

https://www.2basetechnologies.com/how-to-build-multilingual-web-apps

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