feature: localization + seo

[wkaisertexas]

Write an actually good product description and then use the Google translate API for conversion into the 39 languages the app store supports.

I know automated translation is not the best, but I think it is fine for this use case of simple strings like "save recording". If it actually is bad, I will know about it.

Arabic, Catalan, Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English (Australia), English (Canada), English (U.K.), English (U.S.), Finnish, French, French (Canada), German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Malay, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese (Brazil), Portuguese (Portugal), Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Spanish (Mexico), Spanish (Spain), Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Vietnamese.

Source: App Store Localizations

[wkaisertexas]

Localizations are interesting and the newfangled way to do them are called string catalogs.

I watched a video on them and they provide means of localizing content by automatically extracting relevant strings upon build. As all Swift UI components use LocalizedString instead of the String format, without any special syntax, localization can be exported.

All these catalogs are some pretty printed JSON which use printf-style type annotations to denote decimal types. Furthermore, strings can be dynamic where things like singulars and plurals can change the surrounding text as well as masculine and feminine nouns can as well.

Honestly, this is such a great tool for seeing all of the customer-facing text which the user sees. For example, I could combine two very similar strings together for added consistency.

[wkaisertexas]

The file format is so easy to use and understand, that a tool like GPT-3.5 or any other equivalently powerful model (bard works well too) would be sufficient to do translation jobs.

Though automatic localization is criticized by many field practitioners, for a solo project which is open sourced to give public agency into translations and where strings are fairly straightforward and no one is going to die if the translations are slightly off, some translation is better than no translation.

[wkaisertexas]

Additionally, I would like to see the impact of translation on search engine optimization (or whatever the app-store specific version of this is called). I have heard boosts as great as 400%.

[wkaisertexas]

Because half localized apps suck, I am going to try making a series of template images in Figma where the translation is easily replaceable.