The creator of PodGrasp, Gary Hughes, localized his app with TraductoPro and provided the following case study review.
About PodGrasp
PodGrasp is a clean simple audio podcast player. Keep a history of your favourite podcast episodes and browse their show notes. Schedule automatic refresh and download of new episodes and the cleanup of episodes you’ve listened to. Subscribe to podcasts using URLs or import and export using OPML.
The objective in localizing PodGrasp…
My goal was to broaden the appeal of PodGrasp by making it easier to use for people who’s first or only language is not English.
How TraductoPro helped me with my localization project…
I’d never localized an app before, after doing some investigation I realized that it would be a tedious process. There are numerous options available for getting translation done and I wanted to make the process as painless as possible. There are endless conflicting opinions on the Internet about which service is the best or most cost effective, I couldn’t find anything that provided an integrated round trip solution like TraductoPro.
The steps I took to localize PodGrasp…
I did a single language (German) first, I opened my Xcode project directly in TraductoPro and it extracted all the localizable strings automatically, it also (after prompting me) replaced all the string literals in my code with calls to NSLocalizedString.
I then added a German localization to the project in TraductoPro. At this point you have the option of sourcing the translation yourself or ordering translations via TraductoPro, I used the in app option which provides up front pricing based on word count and quality. I proceeded to the checkout and placed my order, several hours later I received an email telling me the translation was complete. I refreshed my project in TraductoPro and it now contained all the translated strings.
Now the fun part, I hit the export button and TraductoPro prompted me to add a German localization to my Xcode project, after doing this it exported the translated strings to my project. Once this was done I started my app in German and there it was! The only thing to do after the export was to resize various UI elements to handle longer or shorter strings in the new language.
I was still in the middle of development for the new version of PodGrasp so this has been a test drive, once I was dev complete I needed to translate more strings for German and I added several other languages. This was simply a matter of refreshing my Xcode project in TraductoPro to pick up the new strings for the German localization and then adding the new languages.
Once the translations were complete I hit a snag when exporting back to Xcode but this is where the fantastic support came in, a support person shared my screen and helped me figure out what was wrong – something unexpected in my project structure which I was able to fix on the spot.
At this time I also localized the meta data for the App Store which was simply a matter of copy pasting text into TraductoPro and ordering the translations, very simple and very fast.
At the end of this process I have PodGrasp translated into 5 languages for a few hours work which was mostly adjusting layout in XIB files.
How TraductoPro solved my problems with localization…
TraductoPro removed a lot of the tedium from the localization process and let me concentrate on the development of PodGrasp. Using TraductoPro saved me a lot of time and hence money.
Turn around time was very fast and in some cases faster than the advertised 4-8 hours.
The snags I ran into…
Some of the dialogs presented during reimport of an Xcode project were not clear leading me to unintentionally delete data. Support retrieved the data so no harm done but perhaps some clearer wording would be better. Yes, I had a couple of issues noted but it was generally very simple and easy to use. It’s refreshing to have a slick development tool.
Would I recommend TraductoPro?
Yes – and I intend to keep using it myself for more languages in PodGrasp for Mac and I’ll soon use it for PodGrasp for iPhone.
Gary Hughes gave TraductoPro a 5 out of 5 star rating and said, “The process wasn’t perfect but it wasn’t far from it and the quick response and attitude from support more than made up for the few issues I had. TraductoPro care about their product and their customers.”
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