Going Global: Key Considerations for Developing Multilingual Mobile Applications

Medialocate USA, Inc.

It's a fact, #1: 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. Penetration rates for the U.S. cell phone market are around 75%, but in Western Europe, Japan and Hong Kong penetration has already exceeded 100 % (multiple cell phones per subscriber). In Europe today, over 20% of all mobile phone subscribers have two phones - out of preference. One is a work phone, the other is a private phone. Or one is for calling, the other for texting. One for daytime, the other for evening, etc. Meanwhile developing countries/regions such as Brazil, India, Africa and Latin America have demonstrated blistering cell phone growth in recent years.

Translation: Your profits may be hindered by your application's lack of "localizability" to Asian, European, African, Middle-Eastern and Latin American languages. International Mobile phone adoption is a source of tremendous growth in the wireless industry.

It's a fact, #2: If your application is English-only, there may be serious hurdles to expanding it to other languages quickly and effectively.

Translation: An application designed around English, without multilingual considerations, will seriously impede global time-to-market in other cultures, and may allow multilingual-savvy competitors to beat you to other lucrative markets.

The Bottom Line: "Multilingual" development is not only acceptance-smart, it's profit-smart. Unfortunately, many developers are still quite "English-centric" and the development of a multilingual application is often more of an "afterthought", rather than consisting of built-in process steps. It is far more cost-effective for both marketing and development strategies to "think global" early on in the game.

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