Localization in Asia: How Spotify Conquered 6 Challenging Markets (Includes Japan Pre-Launch Case Study)

Posted on October 31, 2016 by Kerri Lu

Missed Part 1 of this series? Read 9 International Growth Strategies Spotify used to acquire more than 100 million users (link here.)

“Everywhere in Asia”

“We want to be everywhere in Asia,” said Sunita Kaur, Managing Director for Spotify Asia to Bloomberg earlier this year.

3 years since Spotify’s Asia expansion, while not yet “everywhere” in the region, the company’s in great shape.

The music streaming service first launched in Asia in 2013, after 5 years and 25 million users worldwide in their global expansion. Their first 3 markets were Singapore, Hong Kong, Malaysia, followed by Taiwan and the Philippines in 2014, and Japan just last month. If their avoidance of China is any indication, this launch sequence is driven by strategy: the Japanese music industry, their latest venture, is notoriously difficult to break into. “Save the hardest for last” is one way to frame it.

All these new users are no doubt contributing to Spotify’s current stats: 100 million active users, 30 million of which are paid subscribers.

Success in Asia can be tricky. From language and cultural barriers, different bureaucratic and payment systems to different consumer habits and mode of e-commerce, costs of living, the list goes on.

So far, it looks like Spotify is winning its Asian markets.

While Spotify has yet to release any revenue data, a recent company-commissioned report by global market-research company TNS shows that its reach in Singapore alone is deep and growing.

If Spotify were a Singaporean radio station, it would be the 3rd largest by weekly reach. In fact, TNS reports that at least 2 out of 5 Singaporeans with internet connection are streaming on Spotify—that’s more music streaming in this market than ever before.

Throughout the rest of their markets in Asia, Kaur cites a 20% conversion rate from free to paid users. “We are now the only music company to actually provide music for free on a mobile device which some people thought was risky,” says Kaur. “What we’re really getting excited about is our user growth.”

Spotify’s success in Asia is no accident. As a continuation of our last article, this case study will cover:

Sunita Kaur’s list of launch strategies unique to Asia
How Spotify Asia applies the company’s growth strategies on-the-ground
Spotify’s pre-launch tactics in Japan
Spotify’s long-term growth plans in Asia and Japan

So what are Spotify’s best practices for dominating in Asia?

Don’t have time to read our full case study? Get the key points in our condensed Slideshare, at the bottom of the page.

Asia is a very different market than the rest of the world.

Of course, all markets are unique in their own ways. But one main challenge specific to the Asia market is its sheer diversity.

“The one main takeaway was understanding how different Asia is from the rest of the world,” reflects Kaur in an interview on her team’s Asia expansion efforts.

“Whereas in the US you’ve got 50 states but it is essentially the same culture and language, you come to Asia and even in just one country like India, for example, it’s almost like having 28 different countries within one because you have such different cultures, such different languages, everything.”

Question all your assumptions about what users are like across a diverse region.

Sunita Kaur’s suggestion when faced with very different markets across even one region: go back to the drawing board whenever you can afford to. Spotify’s best practice is “to not have a cookie cutter strategy that we use across each market,” said Kaur.

“With each country that we go into…we work with the big artists here… When we look at the music trends across all of the different countries, every country is very, very passionate about their local artists so it’s not just the big international stars that trend well across Asia.”

They try to invest in “build[ing] up a marketing story” in each new market. “It is kind of starting from ground zero in every country,” she adds.

Stay relevant in your local market through online channels.

Research your new market well and make sure you’re reaching out to your users through appropriate channels with relevant content. This applies not only to marketing but to your product and services as well.

Kaur revealed Spotify Asia’s strategy on staying relevant involves the following:

1. There is particularly high mobile adoption throughout Asia.

“A mobile first strategy was very important to us here,” says Kaur. “It made sense for us because everybody here lives on their mobiles.”

2. Targeting social media for distribution pays off.

A mobile first strategy meant Kaur’s team focused on social media as an active channel.

“When we launched this new feature people were talking about it in social media. Our best marketers are Spotify users.” LINE and Facebook are popular choices in many countries in Southeast Asia.

3. Speak the local language. Aside from translation, it’s key to stay on top of what’s on your users’ minds and producing great local content.

Sometimes this means keeping an ear on the local news and having a say.

When Singapore and Malaysia were affected with smoke from neighboring Indonesia’s forest fires, Spotify responded with a tongue-in-cheek special playlist, “Hazed and Confused,” featuring 40 fiery tracks like Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start The Fire” and Maroon 5’s “Harder to Breathe.” The playlist was a hit, with many social shares among local listeners.

4. Test and experiment which advertising channels are most effective.

With a growing consciousness among consumers for video advertising, Kaur and her team have started rolling out video ads in Singapore in April of this year.

“Our stable of offerings has been really about owning the ears and the eyes,” she said.

Singapore is the initial test country, with many more markets lined up this year. Kaur claims it will be a priority for the whole company moving forward.

Engage your target users offline.

Graham James, head of Spotify’s U.S. communications, says that their priorities for localization are: “launching great local content […] and building out a strong local team in the market.”

The local team’s presence is key for their offline events, which are essential to Spotify’s two-fold goals of engaging local listeners and empowering local musicians—who are also part of the platform’s target users.

One of Kaur’s priorities is to nurture the talent within each market. Spotify Asia has unique playlists in each market that promotes new, local music to listeners. In the Philippines, the company has held concerts featuring local artists, teaming up with local partners to enable showcasing artists within the local mainstream music industry, like in Hong Kong, or allowing listeners to vote and share their favorites at live events, like in the Philippines.

Meet your customers where they are: local offerings and payment systems

Spotify’s Asia strategy involves improving local content popular to target markets: this means prioritizing licensing for Korean pop music that’s all the rage in Southeast Asia.

Once they’ve got listeners and artists in the pipeline, Spotify Asia prioritizes investing in payment systems and partnerships that make the actual transaction easy.

[bctt tweet=”Keep in mind: “easy” payment systems is relative, and relies on local habits. ” username=”OneSkyApp”]

Kaur cites this as a major learning experience when they started expanding in Asia and Latin America, so they’ve depended on their partnerships with telcos.

“Our telco partners in Asia are an incredibly large part of what we do,” said Kaur to Campaign Asia. “There are so many amazing payment options out here, we’ve just got to make sure we find the right one for us.”

And find it they did.

Credit cards are a rare sight in Indonesia and the Philippines, compared to more developed markets, so Spotify offered cash payments for the very first time. They also made sure other popular options were available (such as bank transfer, ATM, Doku Wallet, and convenience store payments.)

Spotify also partnered with phone company Indosat Tbk PT for monthly deal packages, just as they had worked with Singtel in Singapore to launch unlimited mobile data streaming for Spotify Premium users.

Adjust your pricing based on local expectations.

It’s one thing to turn a profit—it’s better to do it while making your customers happy with your pricing. More satisfied users leads to more subscribers which gives you higher overall revenue in the long term, even if you offer your services at a lower price point.

This is the best practice that Spotify discovered when working in Asia, where the company offered different pricing based on the average incomes of its various Asian markets: Spotify Premium currently runs for USD $7.10 per month in Singapore, $6.20 in Hong Kong, around $5 for Taiwan, and less than $4 in the Philippines and Indonesia. All these are adjusted from the $10 rate for listeners in the U.S.

(To see how this applies to their global marketplace, check out this unofficial Spotify Pricing Index.)

Stay open to unexpected hits—and run with them.

Spotify Asia’s digital advertising portfolio, as Kaur puts it, has “such an eclectic mix of brands”—but they didn’t set out to win them in the beginning.

“When we started, we thought, ‘oh, we’re very consumer-related and automotive,” she remembers. This was the case until they started seeing financial institutions succeed in advertising on their platform. FWD Insurance in Hong Kong won 3 awards at mobile advertising Mob-Ex awards for their innovative ads on Spotify since 2014. “So, what we’re actually seeing,” says Kaur, “is yes, you can apply digital [advertising] and music to any brand out there and do it in very creative ways.”

Launching Japan

After years of “Coming Soon,” Spotify finally rolled out as an invite-only service in Japan early this month to high expectations and major hurdles, many of which find its roots in lack of digital content—a surprising reality in Japan given its high-tech image and status as the world’s 3rd-largest economy.

One of Spotify’s local partners, Japanese ad agency Dentsu, agreed at the time of launch that despite being the 2nd-largest music market in the world at USD $3 billion in annual sales, “the Japanese [digital music] market remains nascent, with no single or widely accepted method to serve digital audio ads.”

In 2015, a handful of music-streaming giants, including Apple, Google, Amazon, Line, and AWA, all launched in Japan—but to little success. With high download rates and free trial periods to entice users, they nevertheless faced challenges converting listeners to paid subscribers.

Spotify is in a prime position to make a dent in the streaming service, since its completely free approach and ease of sharing among users is unique. Germany, a market similarly dominated by CD sales, was declining from 1998 until Spotify’s launch in the market reinvigorated music sales in 2012.

Yuma Sakata, head of Dentsu’s US Entertainment arm says Dentsu expects Spotify “to be a pioneer of digital audio ads in the Japanese market.”

While it’s still too early to tell whether the company is gaining ground in this uniquely challenging new market, here are some useful best practices we picked up from its pre-launch set-up:

Keep your future users in the loop.

Spotify does this simply through redirecting its new users to a “coming soon” page in a particular sub-domain. Here’s the one for Japan, which told visitors they were “preparing for launch”:

Figure out a new product fit for a new market.

To face the behemoth of Japan’s robust CD industry—which still accounts for 80% of music sales in Japan, a phenomenal figure for a medium already written off by the rest of the world as a tech relic—Spotify is gearing up to transform users’ mindsets towards not only their platform, but streaming at large.

This means maintaining Spotify’s status as a freemium music provider, ensuring the quality and selection of music, with emphasis on local content, with 85% of Japanese music fans in favor of domestic artists, according to Sebastian Mair, Tokyo-based president of Music Solutions, a music industry consultancy.

He says that Spotify’s current offerings has “major holes—the minimum to launch.” But given that no service “even has close to a complete [free] catalogue” this is a definite opportunity for Spotify in Japan, and in alignment with Spotify Asia’s overall strategy.

“We tend not to launch in a market until we have a very robust local music catalogue,” said Kaur last July. “Because we want to make sure that we’ve got very, very strong local music content.”

Aside from clear brand positioning, Spotify Japan needs to adapt their services to a market that’s “always its own world,” according to Mair. To this end, they’ve set up custom Gaming mode for the country’s high percentage of online gamers. They’ve also partnered with Sony PlayStation for karaoke lyrics support and will provide music for PlayStation Music as well.

Test your localization with your first local users.

Spotify is well-known for following an “invite-only” launch strategy in most of its new markets, gaining a solid and loyal user base over time.

But this beta-testing period is far from stagnant. The local Spotify team uses all the user feedback and signals they receive to improve their offerings, adjust product market fit, and investigate new ways to make their official launch a success.

Some of these product signals are “really coming from everywhere,” according to Sunita Kaur, and they end up affecting Spotify’s global service. “It is being able to take [the feedback] and then making the best decision you can for your users…”

“As we launch in more countries we’ll continue to learn by building for the user instead of just building a brand,” Kaur highlights.

Start building an experienced local team before you launch.

Before Spotify made any announcements of plans to expand to Japan, the company was already lining up its local players at the ground level, including beginning to hire for 12 members for its Japan team as early as January of 2016. They were also making moves to establish offices in Tokyo.

This comes from the deep understanding that the people matter—and people who understand the local consumer and business culture can make a huge impact. According to their job ads for the fast-growing team, Japanese fluency—and with it, understanding the cultural nuances inherent to the Japanese language—is a necessary requirement for most roles.

Always think in the long-term.

Even though the current Asian markets are keeping Kaur’s team “pretty busy” at the moment, they have plans to move to the rest of Asia and are always thinking about what’s next.

When asked whether the company is approaching breakeven, Faisal Galaria, Spotify’s head of global corporate and business development told paidContent:UK that they’re eyeing long-term success over short-term profits.

“We’re more focused on, rather than racing toward profitability, building a company that is in many, many countries. That takes a considerable investment to do that.”

Spotify has remained tight-lipped about whether it will try to take on China’s massive market, and the 99% pirated music proliferation that comes with it. For now, the company’s focus remains on its initial launch markets, but who knows? Maybe we’ll see a different headline in Chinese in a few years’ time…

Here’s a recap summary in Slideshare format, with some more details:

How to Win Asia Like Spotify from OneSkyApp

Your Turn

Interested in applying Spotify’s strategies in your own expansion into new markets? Get started with our free Essential Guide to App Localization (click below to download):

About OneSky

OneSky provides seamless end-to-end localization solutions for thousands of mobile apps, games, websites, and businesses worldwide. We offer professional translation services in 50+ languages and a translation management system (TMS) with API integrations and plugins to streamline your workflow. We hire and carefully screen our own translators to ensure the highest control over quality. Using OneSky’s powerful QA features, cross-functional teams collaborate efficiently to deliver faster release cycles and higher quality translations. See how you can go global at www.oneskyapp.com

9 International Growth Strategies from Spotify

Posted on October 19, 2016 by Kerri Lu

This article is Part 1 of our 2-part series on Spotify. Read Part 2 for a deep-dive on Spotify’s successful Asia expansion, including their pre-launch strategy for Japan.

2016 is Spotify’s year in the spotlight.

Then again, since its meteoric rise in the last decade, Spotify has already spent many years on everyone’s radar.

To date, Spotify has half a billion registered users, more than 100+ million active users, and 40 million paying subscribers worldwide—all streaming the 30 million songs on a platform that’s available in 50+ languages.

Spotify’s growth in paid users is exponential: the number of paying customers was 30 million just 5 months ago. The company, which grew from a small team in Stockholm to more than 1,500 employees worldwide, is currently valued at more than $8 billion. (That’s more than the entire US recorded music industry.)

While Spotify’s payment model for artists remains controversial, it’s hard to deny its status as one of few pioneering companies at the helm of the music industry’s shift to include online streaming as a viable distribution channel—for 500 million listeners and counting.

[bctt tweet=”One of the reasons behind Spotify’s success is its unique localization strategy. ” username=”OneSkyApp”]

Compared to other tech giants, which move quickly into as many markets as they can, Spotify has to handle localization differently. The company’s constant engagements with record labels, massive corporations with many layers of bureaucracy, means a more thorough—and at times, slower—localization process.

But taking more time to lay the groundwork has had little impact on the success of Spotify’s international expansion.

With local versions in more than 60 countries, Spotify is rumored to IPO by late 2017 and has just launched in Japan in late September. Japan is said to be one of the toughest and largest music industry markets to break into—but with so much tested success in their localization strategy, it’s no surprise that Spotify is lining up to bat.

So how does Spotify do it?

This post is the first in a two-part series on Spotify’s localization, which will cover:

Why localization is crucial to Spotify’s business model

Two approaches to going global—and why Spotify wins choosing the less popular one

Step-by-step breakdown 9 localization strategies from Spotify, with examples

Case study of Spotify’s expansion to Asia

Why global expansion was always Spotify’s endgame

Before we get into Spotify’s localization playbook, it’s important to first understand why localization is a #1 priority to Spotify’s success as a company.

1. The music industry is global

While it might feel like Beyoncé is everywhere around the world these days, 80% of the world does not speak English—and their music tastes reflect that. Ever heard of Yalın, İrem Derici, or Бурито? These are the hottest musicians in Russia and Turkey right now.

Spotify is eyeing the true international size of the music industry pie.

“We expect the music industry to have 1.5 billion customers globally” says Willard Ahdridtz, head of Kobalt, one of Spotify’s key partners that handles creative rights, loyalty collections, and licensing for more than half of the Billboard Top 100 artists.

[bctt tweet=”We’re facing a huge explosion of growth.—Willard Ahdridtz, Kobalt CEO on music industry” username=”OneSkyApp”]

2. Spotify’s mission is a global vision

Nobody explains this better than CEO Daniel Ek himself, who claims that one of Spotify’s long-term goals is “to be a destination […] where people from every country in the world can exchange music with each other…”

Former long-time European sales manager, Jonathan Forster, backs this sentiment by explaining their aggressive expansion plans. “We could’ve settled for just being the largest service for music streaming in Sweden. Then we would have been profitable today,” says Forster. “But instead, we are investing almost all revenue to grow globally, and it costs a lot of time and money.”

3. Spotify is trying to shift a global paradigm

Ek’s global vision for Spotify extends to the industry he’s trying to disrupt. Moving traditional radio behavior online through streaming is a universal shift in music listening habits. Changing user mindsets from “ownership”—buying physical and online records for personal libraries—into “access”—streaming a massive collection online through subscription fees—requires a large user-base—of both artists and listeners—in order to be sustainable and profitable.

Ek hopes for Spotify to become as easy as “taking a CD and putting it in any player and pressing play.” Becoming ubiquitous like the CD once was requires complete market penetration, many times over.

This goal of a full market penetration is why social sharing is such a huge part of Spotify’s product development. The rewards for listeners—and the company—hinges on early adopters sharing music with their friends, and being able to do so easily through the platform.

Now that we know the principles driving Spotify’s global vision, let’s dive into their localization best practices.

1. Commit to a defined long-term strategy in choosing your markets.

It’s one thing to have a list of markets you want to launch in based on different metrics—it’s a level above to have a well-researched strategic backbone supporting these choices.

Take Spotify vs. Deezer for example. French web music streaming company Deezer is one of Spotify’s competitors. Although its user-base is small compared to Spotify’s (they have 6+ million paid users compared to Spotify’s 39 million), Deezer has already established its freemium platform in 180+ countries compared to Spotify’s 60.

How can Deezer be in more markets yet have less users than Spotify?

Because Spotify and Deezer have completely different expansion strategies.

According to an ex-Deezer employee on Quora, Deezer pursued a much more aggressive plan in the beginning of their international expansion because they avoided launching in the behemoth U.S. market for as long as they could, targeting a larger set of smaller emerging markets instead. Spotify took the US market head-on, footing its huge cost of entry, and are seeing major success on their bet now, 10 years out.

No matter what your strategy is, make sure you have well-researched motivations for it. Looking at how your competitors are doing in certain markets might be a good indicator. Netflix, for example, is taking cues from Apple and Disney’s regulatory troubles in China to avoid launching in their biggest market for now.

In order for Spotify to successfully pull this strategy off, they had to make sure their proof of concept was rock-solid in Europe, before their one all-or-nothing shot at the United States.

In 2011, 3 years after the company went live in Sweden and just before its massive US launch, Spotify hit its 1 million paid users milestone. This was the signal they needed that they were ready. With this announcement came another fundraising round to set them up for what turned out to be a successful US launch in the fall.

2. Adapt your product using current market trends and user behavior.

Spotify has got its product-market fit down to a tee, even when those markets change drastically. The company knows how its product can help users, which means they can either:

make changes to tailor their product to a new market’s needs, or

strategize how to enter the market with their product as is.

When Spotify was readying for the US launch in 2011, the product was still centered around the search box, assuming that the average user was an “active listener,” and would search for exactly what she wanted to listen to. The US market at the time was dominated by Pandora and American radio culture, which encourage a more “passive listening” model. To meet the needs of the pre-existing user behavior, Spotify built more curation into its streaming services, including the innovative Discover Weekly feature.

But be careful—long-term trends in your industry are important to consider as well. Spotify’s emphasis on curation shows that Ek is aware of where the global industry is headed down the line.

“The main [streaming] services all offer more than 30 million tracks and have a similar quality and approach,” says Francis Keeling, Global Head of Digital Business at Universal Music. “The value comes in what is being placed over the top.”

[bctt tweet=”It’s all about curation, recommendation and influence.—Francis Keeling” username=”OneSkyApp”]

3. On the flip side, maximize the potential of your universal features for agile localization.

You might not have time to build new features for every market, so how can you achieve your Minimum Viable Localization (MVL)? The place to start is by looking at the parts of your product that’s universal, such as an intuitive UI design.

Spotify’s universal hit is the Running feature, which are curated playlists where the music adapts to someone’s running speed.

As Gustav Söderström, Spotify’s Chief Product Officer confirms, “[Running is] a major activity in each country.”

He calls his team “social scientists” who have studied 60 million users’ habits worldwide. With “access to, easily, several million running playlists from around the world,” they built this feature for the global market.

4. Invest ample time to figure out what new users want.

For Spotify, each new feature—and new market—involves months of planning before the official launch. In an interview with Dagens Nyheter, Ek explains that when Spotify “launch[es] something,” it will always be tested for 6 months first, so they are “already sure of what users want.”

Ek says, even as they are pivoting from a music platform to a lifestyle brand, they are making sure their strategies for new markets are in line with what they stand for, and cater to their new users as well.

5. Use the minimum viable benchmark for the technical aspect of your global launch…

Unless your product is related to security or data encryption, you might consider launching in new markets before you’ve reached the best technical version of your app or game.

For Spotify’s much delayed U.S. launch in 2011, the “collaborative filtering” algorithms used to connect users with music were basic, no frills. The New Yorker Magazine reports that they were “more often annoying than useful” in the beginning.

Over time, these algorithms saw major improvement. In early 2014, once Spotify had a strong user-base in the U.S., to further develop their music suggestion features, they acquired a Boston-based startup called Echo Nest that has developed an artificial music intelligence product.

6. …and improve your product based on your localization results.

When you launch in new markets, the more diverse user-base you become exposed to provides more data to help you build a better product. This is true even if your product is not B2C. Getting more feedback about the end-user, whether they’re an individual or a business, will allow you to focus on improving your market fit.

Over the years, Spotify’s value proposition has evolved to creating more personalized listening experiences for every user by leveraging the vast amount of all user data they have accumulated across geographies and time. By taking advantage of the multi-market exposure to their product, it can create a more robust and adaptable product.

For example, Spotify’s R&D efforts include developing advanced automated personal curation for individual users, based on their music preferences data. (This can go as far as figuring out how local users respond differently to major events, like how soccer fans from different countries celebrated the FIFA 2014 results differently through music.)

Spotify is also aware that the majority of its users are mobile and might travel often. Its paid subscription package (“Spotify Premium”) allows users to use Spotify anywhere in the world, for people constantly on the move. Even with their freemium service, they allow users 14 days of free listening abroad and make it easy to switch countries.

7. Launch in new markets in a way that’s suitable for your primary target users.

A recent Spotify-commissioned study by TNS global market research firm shows that strong social media influencers are predominant among Spotify’s users.

This is something Spotify already knows very well. The company takes full advantage of appealing to their primary users through the way they launch in any new market: a private beta period, building buzz through local influencers/early adopters, iterating their local features based on feedback during this period, and launching to the full market after a few months, when there is already a lot of hype surrounding the product.

Klout, a social media influence ranking service, held a promotion for Spotify invites for the U.S. launch that was so popular, both Klout and Spotify platforms almost crashed. According to GrowthHackers, in every country that Spotify has launched, the private beta period and scarcity of invites to use Spotify “increased demand among potential users.”

Whether the scarcity of invites is a marketing tactic or a real concern over server bandwidth, Spotify went on to gain, within a year, more than 3 million US users (20% of whom were paid subscribers) who listened to 13 billion streamed songs.

8. Adapt to local buying behaviors and payment systems.

Pricing appropriately according to local averages is important. Equally key to localization, if not more, is studying local consumer tastes and payment systems—so, how and why consumers make purchases online.

Brazil, with its 100 million music fans, has been a hotbed for fierce competition between streaming services fighting to break into the market. As almost all local smartphones are run on Android OS, Google Play has a homegrown advantage. According to The Rolling Stone, Spotify and some of its competitors have made progress from adapting their product to accommodate the country’s major income disparity and diverse musical tastes.

As for payment systems, Spotify has invested in developing direct carrier billing with telco partnerships across Europe so Premium subscribers can use their mobile numbers to pay, without the need for a credit card. They’ve seen so much success in this model that the default payment method in Europe is now switched to carrier billing, as a stored payment method in the same way that credit card details would be.

9. Be transparent with your local users and put out fires immediately.

Spotify is a long-time expert of turning potential PR disasters into wins for the company. In response to Taylor Swift’s 2014 high-profile pull-out from Spotify, Daniel Ek personally wrote a close-to-2000-word blog post addressing artists’ concerns that Spotify wasn’t paying its artists enough. He titled the post, “$2 Billion and Counting,” a reference to the amount they had paid artists up to that point.

Ek already had practice facing this PR hurdle in Sweden. When they first encountered dissatisfied artists in their home country, Ek’s team solved it by building a website where artists could log in and see how much they were being streamed in different contexts, and how this relates to the payment they were receiving through Spotify. Increasing transparency has “silenced quite a lot of this debate,” says Ek in an interview.

Another transparency tip: prior to its launch in new markets, Spotify will set up a temporary homepage sub-domain for that country, with an optional alert once they launch if you leave your email. Prior to Japan’s launch, the message read: “We are preparing service in Japan. We will notify you as soon as service starts.”

Learn Spotify’s Asian Expansion Strategy Next…

While Spotify is still working hard to change people’s minds about music streaming vs. ownership, its latest expansion efforts in Asia are impressive.

Read Part 2 of our Spotify series, where we focus on the best practices in their latest efforts in Japan, as well as Spotify’s successful expansions in other parts of Asia.

Before we go, let’s do a quick recap on the 9 strategies that were key to Spotify’s global growth:

Commit to a long-term strategy in choosing your markets.

Adapt your product using current market trends and user behavior.

Maximize the potential of your universal features for agile localization.

Invest ample time to figure out what new users want.

Use the minimum viable benchmark for the technical aspect of your global launch.

Improve your product based on your localization results.

Launch in new markets in a way that’s suitable for your primary target users.

Adapt to local buying behaviors and payment systems.

Be transparent with your local users and put out fires immediately.

Read more case studies from Uber, Airbnb, and GoDaddy on how some of the most globally successful companies go global.

Learn more strategies on developing a continuous localization strategy in our FREE eBook, The Beginner’s Guide to Minimum Viable Localization (MVL):

5 Global Marketing Strategies for Winning 3 Key APAC Holiday Campaigns (2016 Edition)

Posted on October 5, 2016 by Kerri Lu

Wondering why your China-based clients and vendors aren’t returning your emails this whole week?

Chances are, they might be one of the nearly 600 million Chinese traveling this first week of October for Golden Week, a week-long national holiday in China. That’s a 12% increase from last year and nearly half of the biggest population in the world.

This is just one of the many holidays celebrated around the world that have significant impact on locals—including their spending behavior, both online and offline.

But these holidays might not be on every marketing team’s radar, especially if they’re not in their primary markets.

Think bigger

As marketers around the world are gearing up for tackling the usual holiday season trifecta (American Thanksgiving-Christmas/Hanukkah-New Year’s), we want to introduce 3 major celebrations based in the APAC region that you can take advantage of in your global marketing.

Across different verticals, there’s nothing like a localized campaign to increase engagement with your current clients, as well as reach and connect to new users. Trying to get to know and understand the local culture is important, for whatever your purposes.

Why APAC?

If you’re new to marketing in APAC, here are 3 statistics that might get you excited about its possibilities:

Asia-Pacific holds the 52.5% of the world’s retail ecommerce market, worth $877.61 billion in 2015, with an explosive growth in key markets 10% faster than the worldwide average.

In a SAP survey with 19,000 APAC consumers, those who were delighted with their digital experience are more than 5.5 times more likely to remain loyal to a brand than unsatisfied ones

Of these satisfied users, 55% would share buying preferences to brands (only 12% of unsatisfied consumers would) making it easier to delight and sell more

High smartphone usage is good news for apps and games. And the strong correlations between brand loyalty and sharing private data after being delighted by a digital experience is great news for everyone.

But as you can tell from these stats, it’s important to make sure your users’ experience with your brand is an engaging one. Reaching out to locals to celebrate their own unique holidays is a fantastic starting point.

Let’s get started!

Labor Thanksgiving Day in Japan | November 23 every year

What is it?

Don’t mistake Japan’s Thanksgiving for a version of American Thanksgiving, though it falls around the same time of the year and has similar roots (it was once a fall harvest festival, similar to Thanksgiving in the U.S.)

Since then, the kinrōkanshahi or Labor Thanksgiving Day has evolved to become a national holiday that celebrates workers in Japan.

How do people celebrate it?

While the main idea is the same as other Thanksgiving holidays around the world—to spend time with family and give thanks—it can get much more specific in Japan (and less focused on turkey and stuffing, which are not a part of the traditions.)

The focus of this day is to be thankful for all workers and laborers in various industries, and to “celebrate manufacturing” in a broad sense. This sometimes means literally thanking workers: schoolkids are sometimes tasked with making thank you cards and preparing gifts for municipal workers such as police, firefighters, and hospital staff.

Another thing to note is the political implications of the holiday. While not explicitly political, many labor unions will take this occasion to have conversations about workers’ rights and celebrate the labor movement.

Subaru Case Study: Host a Localized Appreciation Event

In 2012, Subaru’s Filipino distributor, Motor Image Pilipinas, organized the first Kansha Festival, a special customer appreciation event for Subaru car owners in the Philippines, as well as fans and those interested in buying Subaru.

The roots of this week-long event are borrowed from Japan’s Labor Thanksgiving Day—”kansha,” like in the name of the holiday, literally means “gratitude”—and was an effort to bridge two cultures together: the Japanese Subaru company and its clients in the Philippines. Special efforts were made to create Japanese decor-inspired showrooms for the occasion. Since then, it has become an annual event and “one of the most awaited and [unique] automobile promo in the Philippines.” This is a great example of connecting with customers off-shore, and how to celebrate a global holiday beyond its “host country.”

Ito-Yokado Case Study: Amplify Local Cultural Values

During Labor Thanksgiving, Japanese families will often take time to enjoy their family’s company and show appreciation for the breadwinners’ hard work in supporting the family, sometimes through cooking a special meal.

A Japanese food chain company, Ito-Yokado, riffed on this idea to produce Labor Thanksgiving-day specific ads. In this TV spot below, some kids start thinking about how to show appreciation for their hardworking dad on Labor Thanksgiving—when they realize the one working just as hard, if not more, might be their mom instead. The family decides to take her out for dinner from Ito-Yokado.

The TV ad not only realizes important Japanese concepts of family and holiday-specific theme of appreciation for hard work, but also features a face immediately recognizable to the local audience: popular Japanese child actress Mana Ashida.

Singles Day in China | November 11 every year

What is it?

This event, which falls on the same day that North American and Commonwealth Nations memorialize WWI, has long been known unofficially among Chinese youth as Singles Day, or GuangGunJie, “bare sticks holiday,” based on the 4 isolated “bare sticks” in the 11.11 date.

It has gained notoriety in recent years in becoming the largest online shopping days worldwide, in large part thanks to Alibaba’s massive Cyber Monday-like online sales event through its e-commerce channels Tmall and Taobao on this holiday, featuring steep timed discounts.

Alibaba HQ’s employees watch the live sales transactions stats on Singles Day 2015.

In 2015, the e-commerce event surged 60% in sales from the previous years, reaching a record total of US $14.3 billion—it took only 8 minutes after the sale went live for Alibaba’s various sites to reach $1 billion in sales. 8 minutes. (For comparison, Cyber Monday in the U.S. topped $3 billion in sales in the same year. That’s only 24 minutes in China Singles Day-time.)

[bctt tweet=”It’s no surprise that China accounts for 40% of the world’s e-commerce sales. ” username=”OneSkyApp”]

How do people celebrate it?

At its foundation, this holiday celebrates the state of singlehood in China, and serves as an opportunity for single people to party with single friends, celebrating their single status, or organize blind date parties to try to not celebrate GuangGunJie the following year.

Alibaba Case Study: Dig Deep Into Local Spending Habits

What started as a little known “folk holiday” among mostly college students has, since Alibaba took over, become a multibillion-dollar annual phenomenon. Now approaching its 8th year, the shopping celebration began in 2009 with just 27 merchants. In 2015, this number grew to 40,000 merchants and millions of discounted products.

A large reason for Alibaba’s success, beyond the company’s sheer growth, is its awareness of local spending habits and cultural values: for whatever their reasons, whether to comfort or to celebrate, many single people—and even those that are “taken”—will buy gifts for themselves and others on this day. And because it’s the largest population in the world, the number of Chinese singles alone is an astronomical 200 million.

To gain an edge in marketing your product to global markets, take a page out of Alibaba’s playbook and get to know the local expectations and cultural values that might fuel spending habits.

[bctt tweet=”Think like Alibaba: Ask what, when, where, and *why* are people buying?” username=”OneSkyApp”]

And if you happen to be launching a campaign near November 11 in China, catch a bit of the tailwind Alibaba has created and offer discounts and promotions of your own. You might just catch some “bare branches” looking to spend.

Diwali/Deepavali in parts of the Asia-Pacific | October 30, 2016

What is it?

The “festival of lights” is an ancient Indian festival celebrated as an official holiday throughout parts of the APAC, including India, Pakistan, Malaysia, Myanmar, Nepal, Singapore, and Sri Lanka. The festival signifies the triumph of light over darkness, as a symbol for good over evil, and a celebration of knowledge and hope, with several possible religious stories as its origin.

It is observed by Hindus, Sikhs, Jains, and Buddhists. While the preparations and rituals are carried out over a five-day period, the main festival night coincides with the darkest, new moon of the Hindu calendar.

How do people celebrate it?

Before the night of Diwali, people renovate, clean, and decorate their homes and office spaces. During Diwali night, people dress up in their best clothes, often new, and light up diyas (lamps and candles) throughout their home, rooftops, and windows, as well as around temples and other buildings in their community. Then, there are family prayers, fireworks, and a family feast including sweets and exchanging gifts between family members.

Similar to New Year’s, this celebration is a major shopping period for communities that celebrate it.

Lifestyle International Case Study: Enlisting Local Help

One way to tap into a holiday campaign in an unfamiliar market is to enlist help from locals.

You might not have the budget to hire a local child celebrity like Ito-Yokado did, but there are plenty of other local influencers who might be interested in co-marketing opportunities.

This is exactly what retailer Dubai-based Lifestyle International had in mind when they wanted to reach their buyers in India in time for Diwali. Their target audience was trendy young people—which matched the typical subscriber of the lifestyle YouTube channel Coupling, run by Sherry Shroff and Vaibhav Talwar, a young Mumbai-based couple.

In the video (below), which has over 34,000 views, the couple visits a Lifestyle store and buys clothes for each other. Not only are potential buyers delighted by testimonials from YouTube personalities they already trust—who also try the clothes on themselves in the video—but are further encouraged to check out Lifestyle stores through a promotional store credit giveaway. This partnership also allows Coupling, the YouTube channel, to benefit from further reach and engagement with their audience through this giveaway promotion. Win-win situation!

Lufthansa Case Study: Engage Local Narratives in Storytelling

With the largest diaspora population in the world, it’s common for Indian families to be separated across generations during festivals focused on the family, such as Diwali.

With this in mind, Lufthansa India launched a ticket giveaway promotion for Diwali. They produced a short film about an old man missing his grand-daughter who has moved away. At the end of the ad, viewers are prompted to visit Lufthansa’s website to enter to win the tickets.

The use of a narrative that speaks to millions of Indians worldwide is compelling and increases Lufthansa’s positioning as an international company that also speaks the local language, and can provide real value to customers because the company understands the reason behind their purchases.

+1 Lufthansa for brand engagement through storytelling!

“What are you waiting for? Christmas?”

As you prepare for this busy holiday season, consider expanding your reach and engaging your audiences across the APAC markets through these 3 local holidays.

A recap of our 5 pro tips from successful campaigns of yore:

Host a localized appreciation event (Subaru)

Amplify universal cultural values (Ito-Yokado)

Dig deep into the market’s spending habits (Alibaba)

Enlist local influencers’ help (Lifestyle International)

Engage home-grown narratives in your brand storytelling (Lufthansa)

Want to learn about more interesting global holidays?

Speaking of Christmas: want to learn about how it’s celebrated in Asia? Or, how the whole world celebrates interesting holidays throughout the year?

This post is just a teaser for OneSky’s upcoming Global Holidays Marketing Guide, a monthly newsletter featuring more interesting holidays around the world, so you can promote your product to new markets.

Sign up now to be one of the first to gain these new global marketing insights:

Twitter’s Alline de Paula Shares 5 Pro Tips for Marketing Localization

Posted on September 28, 2016 by Kerri Lu

It takes a village to raise a child. But if your child is a product ready to go global, uniting your “village,” or team, is a major challenge—particularly when it comes to your marketing localization.

The main pain point when it comes to localizing your marketing assets is deciding who gets the final say: is it your Marketing Team, the gatekeepers of your unified international messaging? Or is it your Localization Team, who knows the ins and outs of individual markets?

It’s not always an issue, but when different priorities are at play (and at odds) it becomes difficult to know whose vision to follow for final result — the Localization Manager, or the Chief of Marketing?

Now, throw your external localization vendors into the mix, who have their own unique perspectives and expertise on the markets you’re localizing to. Your marketing localization workflow can start to get out of hand.

Twitter, as one of the world’s most successfully localized companies, recognized the need for a solution.

Take their SMB Marketing Content team, for example. They were getting pulled away from actual time creating content with tedious logistical back-and-forth with Localization Teams. On the other end, external vendors and internal Localization Teams were burdened with marketing assets not technically ready for internationalization. They knew that if they didn’t address these minor frictions soon, they would start to veer off-track and lose momentum in shipping their marketing worldwide.

To solve this issue, Twitter created an entirely new position in the company. Enter Alline de Paula, the Twitter SMB Team’s Localization Marketing Manager.

As part-marketing strategist, part-localization project manager, she sits between the Marketing and Localization teams to mediate between the two. Her role serves to keep both sides happy, balancing the company’s high-level marketing and localization priorities.

In other words, she’s the tie-breaker.

We had the chance to catch up with Alline to find out more about:

Her unconventional career path that led her to her current role

Challenges in marketing localization

Best practices managing both Marketing and Localization teams

How her work optimizes Twitter’s marketing localization process

Can you share a bit about your background and how you ended up in this role?

I started my journey in localization as a freelancer translator for video-games. From there, I moved to coordinating a team of video-game translators for Brazilian Portuguese, which I speak.

From coordinating the team of video-game translators for a translation vendor, I progressed to coordinating languages I didn’t know, and to enter the marketing localization world for the first time.

There, I carved out a new role for myself. I mediated the communication between translators and marketing reviewers on the client’s side. This meant that I heard from the stakeholders themselves — what they needed in terms of level of service, innovation, deadlines, etc. And it was my job to bring those needs and wants to life within my team.

This pushed me to be involved with many teams and projects at once. It set me up perfectly for my current role at Twitter.

What are your main responsibilities as a Localization Marketing Manager?

My role is unique, and there’s not a dull moment! I focus on production and strategy.

“Production” encompasses the translation requests that my team sends me and I coordinate with Twitter’s Localization Team.

“Strategy” includes being in touch with our Marketing Managers to make sure our content is global and localizable, SEO for our localized pages, launching new languages, and any bespoke local content that needs to be produced by native speakers.

It’s a perfect mixture of Localization and Marketing Management. It is a perfect match and it has been a very happy, very busy year for me!

Let’s talk a bit about Twitter’s localization workflow.What does your system look like end-to-end?

For our team, which is SMB Marketing Content, the Marketing Managers produce the content — with a lot of my input — then the requests cascade down to me for localization.

From there, I make sure we have everything the translators need and then ship it to Twitter’s Localization Team. They manage the deadlines with vendors.

I also ensure that the vendor get as much insight from our team as possible with frequent calls with our Copywriter, who shares insights, best practices, etc.

What’s most helpful about your role within this system?

My dynamic with both sides ensures that our stakeholders and Marketing Managers don’t have to worry about localization timing, leaving them to concentrate on other initiatives. This also ensures that what gets to the vendor is well-briefed and fully localizable—making for high-quality content that will meet our team’s goals.

Can you share any “best practices” you’ve learned for the localization process?

[bctt tweet=”Marketing localization has it’s own pace and dynamic. @allinedepaula” username=”OneSkyApp”]

You cannot think of it the same as any other localization work you do.

I learned from experience that the relationship between the stakeholder, the client’s internal reviewers, and the translators is the key to success. The more feedback the localization vendor receives (the more insight they get from the client’s team on the company’s goals, voice, and style) the higher the quality of the output.

How much interaction do you have with stakeholders during the localization process?

[bctt tweet=”I find it extremely important that the stakeholder gets educated on the ins and outs of localization”]

If they are not localization-savvy, it can cause a lot of misunderstandings, frustration, or delays. Taking the time to educate the client on the localization process, why it works a certain way, and how they can benefit from it is important to a healthy, smooth localization workflow.

What are some of your main challenges in localization? How do you work around them?

One word: “innovation”

The world is getting smaller and we need to ship content globally at lightening speed. The only way to achieve that is to rely on localization vendors to not only have the right technology in place, but to be innovative on the way they use it to solve the client’s problems. I’ve seen many cases of teams not going through the localization path with their content because “it takes too much time” or “it’s too complicated”.

It’s down to the localization vendors out there to come up with creative ideas to solve each particular issue, and make it work for their client.

Wrap Up

Even if you don’t have the capacity to hire someone for this role, we think that Alline’s best practices can help improve localization workflows of any scale involving marketing.

Here are the 5 key takeaways and lessons from Alline:

Conceptualize managing your Marketing and Localization teams at two levels: Strategy and Production.

Appoint someone designated to oversee your Marketing Localization to save marketers from worrying about localization timelines, and localization teams will receive higher-quality content from the Manager’s input.

Facilitate good communication between the three parties (the stakeholder, internal reviewers, and the translators.) This is essential to the whole process.

Take time to educate yourself on how the localization process works and why it can benefit your product. Understanding the purpose behind it and how you’ll get to your targets go a long way in setting up how you carry out localization.

Choose a localization vendor that is innovative and able to come up with creative ways to solve issues that come up, and who will best serve your needs.

Alline (@allinedepaula) is the Localization Marketing Manager at Twitter, where she makes the company’s goal of “reaching every person on the planet” possible by managing the localization of global marketing materials into 10 different languages. Brazilian by birth and Irish by heart, Alline’s career started with International Trade, settled into Localization and eventually, Marketing. At Twitter, she has revamped global localization processes, on-boarded new countries and languages, and taught Americans to cool it on all those exclamation points. Alline is the wife of one lucky man and proud mother of three lucky tortoises.
Twitter, Inc. (NYSE: TWTR) is what’s happening in the world right now. From breaking news and entertainment to sports and politics, from big events to everyday interests. If it’s happening anywhere, it’s happening first on Twitter. Twitter is where the full story unfolds with all the live commentary and where live events come to life unlike anywhere else. Twitter is available in more than 40 languages around the world. The service can be accessed at Twitter.com, on a variety of mobile devices and via SMS. For more information, visit about.twitter.com or follow @twitter.

Interested in going global?

Localizing your marketing is just the beginning.

Learn how to handle your entire localization process efficiently with our step-by-step Beginner’s Guide to App Localization:

6 Expert Translators on Crafting Better Translations

Posted on September 27, 2016 by Kerri Lu

This Friday, September 30th is International Translation Day, where we take the opportunity to recognize the growing community of translators around the world.

As one of today’s fastest-growing industries, translation plays a critical and influential role in globalization, especially as more and more businesses are moving online and becoming accessible at an unprecedented scale.

Despite developments in translation technology, nothing comes close to the quality of work produced by professional translators.

With their linguistic training and dedication to their craft, they’re able to break down language barriers with a human touch that machines simply can’t replicate.

To celebrate this occasion, we’ve asked 6 long-time OneSky translators for their top tips for translation and what they love most about their work.

(Read through to the end for a special discount for our Professional Translation services!)

About Bora

Bora is an English-Turkish translator. He loves translation because it is a job that relies on creativity. “You can translate many words and phrases in many different ways – it is up to you which one you choose” he says. “So, in the end, it is your creation and artwork.” Bora enjoys the feeling, after a long day of hard work, that his creativity has paid off and he has a high-quality finished translation project.

#1 Be empathetic of your reader

“Since our aim is localizing, we have to put ourselves into the reader’s shoes and read the text after we translate it. Only then can we realize if it appeals to the target language group.”

About Graciela

Graciela is an English to Spanish translator. With more than 15 years of translation experience, she has worked in many different subjects. She loves translation because it allows her to combine her two passions: video games and languages.

#2 Use a consistent voice and glossary

“The most important thing when localizing is to decide the style and basic terminology that are going to be used. Consistency is a priority so it’s essential to create a glossary and follow it throughout the whole project, especially when working with a team.”

About Akiko

Akiko is an English to Japanese translator who, in her own words, is an “organized, systems-oriented and detail-oriented person who enjoys languages, reading and solving puzzles.” Translation is the perfect combination of all of these interests, and “fits her personal traits like a jigsaw puzzle.” She enjoys discovering all sorts of interesting apps in different industries through her work with OneSky. “This is a really fun bonus for me and I love the opportunity to be able to translate a wide variety of subjects and to keep learning something new all the time.”

#3 Study and read

“Study the subject matter relevant to what you are translating. Study translation techniques and keep improving your memory. (There are a lot of websites and books available on translation techniques.) Doing a lot of reading in the target language is also important. When I come across expressions that impress me or interest me, I add them to my database.”

About Anwer

Anwer is an English to French translator who enjoys “having the ability to connect with clients from so many different countries and cultures.” As he says, “it’s great to discover so many concepts and words from a wide range of themes and subjects.”

#4 Communicating with the client on a regular basis

“Whether it’s about the character limit of a specific string or the intended meaning of certain words/expression, communication is crucial. It puts the client at ease and shows them our dedication as translators.”

About Sunu

Sunu is an English to Indonesian translator who loves being able to “bridge the gap” between different languages in his translations: “No matter the type of translation work, there is always something new that I can learn. Translation work also allows me to be my own boss, work from home, and do whatever I want when I need a break.”

#5 Do your research

“Sometimes we face difficulties when translating a document. Use search engines to find information on the web to make sure that you use correct collocations/word pairings and terms to produce accurate translation. When in doubt, don’t hesitate to contact the client and ask questions.”

About Valeria

Valeria is an English to Italian translator who loves how translation allows her to “learn something new each day”: “I am always up-to-date with local and international news. I can plan my days as I want and I can work in (almost) any place in the world. In the end, I usually stay at home with my office chair and 2 monitors, but that’s still MY choice!” Her motto is: “Work less, earn more and enjoy your time!”

#6 Be honest with yourself

“If you don’t feel comfortable with a job, don’t accept it. There could be many reasons why a job does not fit you (rates are too low, the topic, the deadline, a frustrating client…), and each one of them is a good reason to say ‘no’.

When in doubt, always ask the client. At the beginning of my freelance career, I was hesitant to ask my clients for clarifications as I was afraid to look unprofessional or to bother them. But now I know that most of the clients are happy to explain specific terms/context: they know you care and you want to get it right.”

Wrap Up

We hope this gives you a better idea of the process and passion behind the exciting translation industry.

Interested in seeing these translators and hundreds of others in action? Check out OneSky’s Professional Translation Services.

Limited time offer: from now until October 27th, get 5% off your initial order of $100+ with “5OFF1SKY” coupon code. Consider it a small gift on us for this special occasion.

Happy International Translation Day!

How to Solve the 5 Most Common Technical Issues in Localization

Posted on September 14, 2016 by Kerri Lu

So you did your research, looked into all your growth options, and decided that a first round of localization for your product is the way to go. You’re ready to go global, but you’re uncertain about all the technical steps involved.

Or you’re already knee-deep in managing your team’s localization efforts and feeling overwhelmed with all the technical jargon.

If you feel like this kid in the image above when navigating the localization process, don’t worry, you’ve come to the right place.

This post will cover the 5 most common issues that come up in the technical side of the localization process and how you can easily navigate these problems with the help of the right tools.

Problem #1: Translations don’t fit on the UI

Languages have different lengths, depending on many factors like sentence structure and size of words. A natural change that occurs when you localize your content is that the length of your text will increase or decrease by up to 30% at times (for example, between Spanish and English.)

While this may not be an issue for a 30% longer conversation in Spanish, it can be a big problem when it comes to fitting translated text back into a space in your interface designed for text 30% shorter.

Solution:

Look up the language changes ahead of time and alert your translators of any suggested word limits you’d like to set based off of that. Give them information about what to prioritize so that if they have to cut content down to the limit, they know what to keep.
The screenshot feature available on OneSky’s translation platform not only allows you to provide context for your strings, but also helps you to establish a visual word limit.

It will also improve your translation quality because you translators will see directly the context for the words they’re translating. (This can be especially helpful for mobile games.)

Problem #2: Plurality is tricky in some languages

An important step in localization is to make sure that you support plural forms.

Did you know: different languages have different rules for forming plurals. In English, there are only two forms: a singular form for “one” (i.e. 1 apple) and a plural form for “everything else EXCEPT FOR one, including zero” (i.e. x apples).

This is simple, but it gets more complicated. Other languages, like Russian, make many more distinctions in plurals. In Russian, there are different linguistic forms for plurals for numbers ending in 1 (except 11), numbers ending in 2-4 (except 12, 14), and other numbers.

Which means that after you put your translated text back into your app, your device may not necessarily know 1) which words are plural, and 2) what plurals types they are. This is even more relevant to languages like French, where adjectives are modified by gender and quantity.

Solution:

Apps built for different frameworks handle plural syntax differently. Here are some resources on working with plurality in Android and iOS. (The OneSky translation platform supports all types of plural forms for the languages we currently have.)

Problem #3: No standardized method for extracting strings

Having more options is always a good thing, right? Actually, not in the case of localization. One major problem in extracting strings from your product is that there isn’t one direct way of doing it, depending on what platforms you’re using.

Because there’s no structured way of doing it, troubleshooting for the technical side of localization can become very challenging.

Solution:

Luckily for iOS and Android apps, Xcode and Android Studios have built-in functionality for extracting strings. For other apps, there are many libraries and dependencies available, such as gettext, l10n.js, and Rails i18n.

Problem #4: Missing or wrong translation strings

If you made an error in string extraction (which results in wrong or missing strings), you won’t find out if the strings are usable and functional until afteryou go through the whole translation process.

This is time-consuming and costly, not to mention manually having to go through your code to find the bugs afterward.

Solution:

An industry standard solution is pseudo-localization. Instead of immediately going through professional translation of the content, the product’s text is replaced with a dummy translation (from a pseudo-language pack) so you can check ahead of time what the localized product will look like.

By using a noticeable “fake” language, this testing method will reveal which hard-coded strings are translatable, and locate the ones that shouldn’t or cannot be translated. It will also allow you to identify design/layout issues that will affect the localized product.

There are several tools and ways to pseudo-localize. Check out this blog post for more details on how to carry out pseudo-localization.

Problem #5: Too much time spent on manual work

If you haven’t guessed it already, the technical workflow in localization involves lots of manual steps: extracting strings, testing them, uploading them onto a platform, then re-integrating all the strings back into your product. This can take up many hours that could have been spent on less tedious tasks.

Solution:

When you’re looking for a translation platform, prioritize one that has APIs which will help you save time. OneSky’s all-in-one translation platform has built-in plugins which can automate your localization process, so you can spend more time focused on building a great product.

You’ve Got This

Hopefully, this gives you the basics to face localization head-on. For more details on the whole process, check out our step-by-step Essential Guide to App Localization:

5 Challenges in English-French Translation and How You Can Solve Them

Posted on September 13, 2016 by Kerri Lu

This post is part of our new series “Translation Challenges” highlighting the unique difficulties in translating to specific languages. With each language, we’ll also offer some insights into the opportunities of localizing to that language. We’ve written on Spanish translations, and future posts will cover other popular languages like German, Chinese, and many more. Subscribe to our blog newsletter so you don’t miss out!

Parlez-vous français?

French speakers are virtually everywhere. It is the only language aside from English spoken on all 5 continents with more than 280 million speakers around the world, including 68 million native speakers. In fact, it is the second most-spoken native language in Europe.

With its Italic-Romance roots, French is also, interestingly, the largest donor of words to English, with its Germanic heritage. Many words in the English language come from French influence. Quelle surprise!

With its detailed grammatical structures, French is considered an international “language of reference.” Among the 6 official languages of the United Nations, French is the only other working language used aside from English. It is one of the 3 procedural languages in the European Union and is the only language used for proceedings of the European Union.

With this wide reach around the globe, it’s easy to see why businesses would be interested in translating materials into the French-speaking market.

Opportunities in French-speaking markets

Bloomberg reports that French is the second most useful language for business after Mandarin, with 27 countries having French as an official language.

However, only about 4% of all internet content is in French. Many French-speaking countries rank low in English levels—including France itself. Both of these facts, in combination with research showing that consumers prefer reading and making purchases online in their native language, makes the French-speaking market ripe for high-quality native, translated content.

Translating to French is tricky

French is a Romance language with its Latin roots—it just happens to also be widely known as the “language of love.” However, as with any language translation, making English fit into a French context is no easy courtship. It is particularly challenging because of the different linguistic roots of the two languages.

Here are 5 common challenges in English-French translation and how you can best prepare for them:

   1. There is no One True French — there are multiple.

Just like there are variations in the English spoken in North America, the UK, and Australia, there are significant differences in the French spoken in France, Belgium, Monaco, the Middle East, Canada and the United States.

While these differences are most apparent in pronunciation, there can be significant cultural differences in grammar, formalities, as well as names of food, clothing, and everyday objects.

Solution:

Depending on where your target user or reader is located, it’s worth identifying the specific French spoken and translating for that strand of the language specifically. If you don’t do this, you risk your audience becoming confused, or worse, frustrated that you did not actually know them—and their language—well.

When screening translators, make sure they have translation experience in the specific regions you are targeting.

   2. French is a longer language

Ever pick up a side-by-side translated text or bilingual book at the bookstore only to realize that the text for one language has many more pages than the other?

Not all languages are created at equal lengths. Some naturally have more words in the sentence structures than others. Research shows that French translations are about 15-20% longer than their original English text.

Solution:

If you’re considering translating text that needs to fit to a specific length, like an app store description or interface text, it’s important to hire a professional translator who will be able to create shorter text while prioritzing your original messaging.

   3. French has many cultural markers unique to its own language

The level of formality built into every language is different. In French, the formal pronoun to “you” (“vous” instead of “tu”) and a more elevated title are often used as a sign of respect or in a formal setting, depending on region.

Solution:

Whether you’re trying to localize a product that is formal or informal, it would be helpful to find a translator with experience translating to a wide demographic range of audiences.

   4. French and English have completely different styles of grammar

Because of its different language origins, these two languages are very different in basic grammar. These are some key differences:

Syntax:

Despite using the same Subject-Verb-Object structure, French offers many variations in word order that don’t make sense in English syntax.

For example, “I play sometimes basketball” or “It was the book the best I have read” make perfect sense in French grammar but sound nonsensical when directly translated into English.

Gender:

French is a two-gender language, meaning nouns are assigned genders, like in French, and can be considered male or female.

There are no rules to this, and knowing what nouns are feminine and masculine can get very confusing very fast!

Verbs:

There are 5-6 different spellings for each verb tense in French, depending on the subject, but English verbs are altered by suffixes for each tense. Not to mention there are many special cases for conjugating unique verbs differently that must be memorized.

Take “manger” (to eat) as an example. The verb in English is only modified in the third-person singular, whereas it conjugates into 3 subjects and numbers in French, making six versions of the verb in each tense. So we say “je mange, tu manges, nous mangeons, ils mangent” to mean “I eat, you eat, we eat, they eat.”

Adjectives:

French adjectives are also altered by the gender and number of the noun, but English adjectives never change.

Solution:

Many subtle differences in the grammar require a careful ear for native grammar. Look for a native-level translator who can pick these out without a problem.

    5. English and French look deceptively the same

Despite their different origins, many words in French and English look very similar, even though their definitions could not be more different. This is because, like other Romance languages, a lot of French actually evolved from Latin, which English is influenced by. As a result, English and French share many words in common from Latin, despite their definitions evolving differently over time. These are known as “false friends.”

“Avertissement” in French looks like it might refer to a marketing ad in English when really, it means “warning.” “Déception” appears to refer to a very serious lie but its English translation is actually “disappointment.”

Be careful – weeding out false friends is especially important to the translation process because they can fool non-native speakers without appearing obviously tricky. Imagine accidentally telling a French speaker you want to “blesser” them after they sneeze, but they think you want to “hurt” them instead!

Solution:

Hire a bilingual translator with high fluency in both English and French so they won’t be fooled by false friends. In your own translations, do occasional spot-checks and look up words that seem like an English word you know, so you can make sure these similar words don’t fall through the cracks.

Wrap Up

With its rich history and diverse varieties, the French language presents many interesting and engaging challenges in translation. If you’re interested in getting text translated to or from French, we offer professional translation services for French, as well as 50+ other languages.

Looking for a more holistic guide to producing and managing high-quality translations? Check out our step-by-step Project Manager’s Guide to Improving Localization Quality:

How Mavenfall Got Featured in 100+ App Stores with Localization

Posted on September 7, 2016 by Kerri Lu

Look up the top challenges facing mobile game developers today and you won’t find just a few—you’ll find dozens of major hurdles.

Among these challenges, ranging from budget concerns to crafting good story content to marketing your game, one problem that comes up over and over again is app discoverability.

According to data from Newzoo Games, mobile games are generating 37% of the $99.6 billion revenue from the gaming industry this year. It’s a rapidly growing and exciting market—but also a hard one to get noticed in.

Our client, Hong Kong-based game developer Blue Tea Games, faced the same challenges prior to launching their largest game Mavenfall: in a sea of mobile games, how do we stand out? And how can we make sure the right players can find us?

Through localizing with OneSky, Mavenfall went on to achieve global success, becoming featured in the App Store as a “Best New Game” in 120 countries.

This week, we got the chance to ask Blue Tea Games Founder and CEO Steve Zhao to walk us through 5 lessons and best practices he’s learned throughout the localization process. This blog post will cover:

BTG’s challenges with app discoverability

the company’s decision to localize

what Steve wishes he had known earlier about localization

their post-localization success

1. Localization is a must to reach a global audience in mobile

Blue Tea Games was founded by Steve in 2007 while he was still in college and became known over the years for their hidden object PC games. The company’s first mobile game was released in 2014.

It was successful, but not to the global scale the company wanted to reach. They realized they needed to translate their game in order to reach gamers around the world, instead of just the English-speaking market.

The plan to pursue localization was a no-brainer.

“Localization is an important step for any game looking to grow beyond its national borders and reach a global audience,” says Steve. “It’s pretty much required for mobile nowadays.”

2. The number of languages can be strategic

Considering Mavenfall is BTG’s first localization effort, it might come as a surprise that Steve decided to translate the game to 14 other languages.

Why 14? Why not just a few?

This number, too, was a part of Steve’s localization strategy.

He explains that, because of Apple’s global marketplace, with its 155 local App Stores around the world, it was the safest bet to translate Mavenfall to at least 14 languages, so they have a higher chance of being featured in App Stores globally.

“Localizing to many languages certainly explains why Apple featured us.”

Blue Tea Games’ localization strategy had the end-goal of being featured, and translating to as many languages as they could handle played into that strategy.

Keep in mind: different localization strategies will involve different benchmarks for the number of languages to translate to.

For example, if you know your key userbase is spread across 3 countries speaking 2 languages, it would be more strategic to translate to those 2 languages to begin with through Minimum Viable Localization (MVL) instead of selecting the most popular 10 languages.

3. Quality and speed are essential to translations

Regardless of the number of languages, Steve emphasizes that quality and speed are essential to a solid localization plan.

He says part of choosing OneSky for his translation needs was our ability to deliver translated texts under a tight deadline.

“The short time to launch was important for us to secure app store features. We needed the languages fast, and that’s why we came to you guys.”

Quality of translation was an essential part to BTG’s localization plan as well—especially in maintaining contextual accuracy.

Through the OneSky platform, Steve was able to get an instant quote and take advantage of our screenshot and glossary plugin features. Being able to upload a screenshot of how the text looks in the actual game is “crucial for mobile gaming” from a game developer point-of-view, he says.

“The glossary feature was great for defining key terms and being able to communicate that to the translators.”

Steve says that working with OneSky instead of a traditional Language Service Provider (LSP) translation company also made a huge difference in their workflow efficiency.

Through the screenshot feature, OneSky translators were able to stay under suggested word count limits for over-long text that conflicted with the game’s visual design. The glossary feature allowed BTG to define what keywords in the game mean and how they should be translated, which allowed translators to then maintain consistency across the game in all 14 international versions.

“If I worked with a translation company,” Steve explains, “they would not be able to see the game context for the key terms. Our OneSky translations were bullet-proof in a sense.”

4. Successful localization = major growth

Through careful localization planning and attention to speed, quality, and a strategic number of translations, Mavenfall was able to achieve major exposure and growth through App Store features and an influx of new international users.

The game’s successful localization was a big win for Steve and BTG: “Our localized game got the #1 spot in Hong Kong, #2 in Japan, #3 in US, and #4 in China. 3000 apps get launched every week and we took every spot. We were Top 10 in 110 countries. Apple only updates their ‘Best New Games’ features every week. It’s a big deal.”

Steve was excited as well about Mavenfall’s success in Asia, particularly in the new large userbase in Southeast Asia. Their original targets were the most popular markets for mobile gaming, so their expansion into the likes of China, Japan, Korea sets them up nicely for successful future launches.

5. Thinking ahead saves time

When we asked Steve if he had any advice for other game developers considering localization, he pointed out that it’s helpful to think ahead in the game development process.

“Try to design visual interfaces with localization in mind,” he explains. “Allow extra spaces in fixed interfaces or create dynamic sizes for things like speech bubbles.” That way, you’ll avoid running into a few tricky challenges with text integration later in the localization process.

This is hard-earned advice that Steve will no doubt incorporate in Blue Tea Games’ exciting new venture with OneSky: developing the world’s first globally localized Virtual Reality (VR) game.

About Steve Zhao

Steve started Blue Tea Games Hong Kong in 2009 to develop adventure titles, later focusing on mobile freemium games. Delivering content globally, Blue Tea’s games are translated to over a dozen languages, reaching a hundred countries and millions of gamers.

About Blue Tea Games

Blue Tea Games is a Hong Kong-based developer for mobile and PC games. Since 2003, it has developed over a dozen original titles across multiple genres, such as puzzle adventures, RPG, simulation, and time management apps. Their games have reached millions of players far and wide through 10+ translations and across various platforms – PC/Mac, retail, and mobile.

Your Turn

Interested in having your own mobile game featured in 100+ App Stores? Check out our step-by-step Beginner’s Guide to Mobile Game Localization:

Localization Tips: Overcoming the Top 5 Challenges in English-Spanish Translations

Posted on August 30, 2016 by Kerri Lu

This post is part of our new series “Translation Challenges” highlighting the unique localization difficulties when it comes to translating to specific languages. With each language, we’ll also offer some localization tips that may help you with your project. Future posts will cover other popular languages like German, French, Chinese, and many more. Subscribe to our blog newsletter so you don’t miss out!

¿Hablas español?

Chances are, given the world’s current language breakdown, there’s a huge chance you do. 427 million chances, to be exact.

With Spanish speakers spanning Europe, the Americas, Africa, and Asia-Pacific, it is estimated that more than 427 million people speak Spanish as a native language. This makes it the language with the second largest group of native speakers in the world.

Spanish is the official language of 22 countries and is expected to be a first language of 50% of the United States population within 50 years—in fact, there are way more native Spanish speakers in the United States than Spain itself!

Opportunities in Spanish-speaking markets

Spanish is the 3rd most used language on the internet, growing 1,312.4% in the last 15 years. It’s one of the top 10 languages for mobile app localization and also fuels a significant gamer population. Latin America has a rapidly growing game industry, with the highest year-on-year growth for games in the world (20.1% this year) for a $4.1 billion total revenue.

According to research by Nielsen, companies looking to market to the Hispanic population in the United States should devote just as much attention to localizing their content, even for bilingual English and Spanish speakers. The reason? People prefer reading and making purchases online in their native language.

Translating to Spanish is tricky

As with any language translation, making English content fit into a Spanish context has many challenges. Spanish is particularly difficult because of its close ties to Italian and Portuguese as a Romance language, which differs from English’s Anglo-Saxon roots.

Here are 5 examples of challenges in English-Spanish translation and how you can best prepare for them:

Localization Challenge 1: There is no One True Spanish — there are multiple.

Just like there are variations in the English spoken in North America, the UK, and Australia, there are major differences in the multiple regional varieties of Spanish, such as European Spanish, Spanish of the Americas, as well as dialect differences within Spain and Hispanic America.

While these differences are most apparent in pronunciation, there are significant differences in grammar, formalities, as well as names of food, clothing, and everyday objects.

Solution:

Depending on where your target user or reader is located, it’s worth identifying the specific Spanish spoken and translating for that strand of the language specifically. If you don’t include this as part of your localization project, you risk your audience becoming confused, or worse, frustrated that you did not actually know them—and their language—well.

When screening translators, make sure they have translation experience in the specific regions you are targeting.

Localization Challenge 2: Spanish is a longer language

Ever pick up a side-by-side translated text or bilingual book at the bookstore only to realize that the text for one language has many more pages than the other?

Not all languages are created at equal lengths. Some naturally have more words in the sentence structures than others. Research shows that Spanish translations are about 30% longer than their original English source text.

Solution:

If you’re considering translating text that needs to fit to a specific length, like an app store description or interface text, it’s important to hire a professional translator who will be able to create shorter text while prioritzing your original messaging.

Localization Challenge 3: Spanish has many cultural nuances unique to its own language

The level of formality built into every language is different. In Spanish, the formal pronoun to “you” (Usted instead of tú) and a more elevated title are often used as a sign of respect or in a formal setting, depending on region. Using nicknames as well is common in many contexts.

Solution:

Whether you’re trying to localize a product that is formal or informal, it would be helpful to find a translator with experience translating to a wide demographic range of audiences.

Localization Challenge 4: Spanish and English have completely different styles of grammar

Because of its different language origins, these two languages are very different in basic grammar. These are some key differences among many:

Syntax:

Despite using the same Subject-Verb-Object structures (i.e. “Xiomara threw the flowers,”) Spanish grammar allows for more leniency with the sentence structure.

For example, an emphasized subject in Spanish is often placed at the end of a sentence. So, if we want to emphasize that Xiomara, not Jane, threw the flowers, in Spanish, the literal syntax would be, “threw the flowers Xiomara” or, “Tiró las flores Xiomara.”

As you can tell, this doesn’t work in English!

Gender:

Spanish is a two-gender language, meaning nouns are assigned genders, like in French, and can be considered male or female.

Generally, objects that end in -a are feminine, while those ending in -o are masculine. But this is not always the case! Despite being worn by women, bikinis are actually a masculine noun in Spanish (el bikini/biquini.)

Verbs:

There are six different spellings for each verb tense in Spanish, depending on the subject, but English verbs are altered by suffixes for each tense.

Take “bailar” (to dance) as an example. The verb in English is only modified in the third-person singular, whereas it conjugates into 3 subjects and numbers in Spanish, making six versions of the verb in each tense. So we say “Yo bailo, tú bailas, ella baila, nosotros bailamos” to mean “I dance, you dance, she dances, they dance”.

Adjectives:

They usually come after the noun in Spanish, but before the noun in English. Spanish adjectives are also altered by the gender and number of the noun, but English adjectives never change.

Solution:

Many subtle differences in the grammar require a careful ear for native grammar. Look for a native-level translator who can pick these out without a problem.

Localization Challenge 5: English and Spanish look deceptively the same

Despite their different origins, many words in Spanish and English look very similar, even though their definitions could not be more different. This is because, like other Romance languages, a lot of Spanish actually evolved from Latin, which English is influenced by. As a result, English and Spanish share many words in common from Latin, despite their definitions evolving differently over time. These are known as “false friends.”

“Pie” in Spanish looks like it refers to a tasty pastry when really, it means your foot (which we don’t recommend eating.) “Éxito” looks closest to a quick escape (exit), when it actually refers to “success.”

Be careful – weeding out false friends is especially important to the translation process because they can fool non-native speakers without appearing obviously tricky. Imagine accidentally translating “groseria” for “grocery” when it means gross or crude, or “embarazada” for “embarrassed” when it means pregnant!

Solution:

Hire a bilingual translator with high fluency in both English and Spanish so they won’t be fooled by false friends. In your own translations, do occasional spot-checks and look up words that seem like an English word you know, so you can make sure these similar words don’t fall through the cracks.

Wrap Up

With its rich history and diverse varieties, the Spanish language presents many interesting and engaging challenges in translation. If you’re interested in getting text translated to or from Spanish, we offer professional translation services for Spanish, as well as 50+ other languages. Check out our website www.oneskyapp.com/ for more info.

Interested in going global? It doesn’t take much to expand your business to one new market. Learn more from our free Minimum Viable Localization (MVL) guide to learn more:

About OneSky

OneSky provides seamless end-to-end localization solutions for thousands of mobile apps, games, websites, and businesses worldwide. We offer professional translation services in 50+ languages and a translation management system (TMS) with API integrations and plugins to streamline your workflow. We hire and carefully screen our own translators to ensure the highest control over quality. Using OneSky’s powerful QA features, cross-functional teams collaborate efficiently to deliver faster release cycles and higher quality translations. See how you can go global at www.oneskyapp.com

Don’t miss out on localization resources and tips! Subscribe to our newsletter to learn the best ways to go global.

7 Tips to Ace Your Mobile Game Launch in Thailand

Posted on August 23, 2016 by Kerri Lu

This blog post is part of our “Where to Go” series, featuring market-specific insights and tips to help you launch in trending markets around the world. Interested in launching in another popular country in the region? Check out our other guides to localizing in Southeast Asia: India, Indonesia, Vietnam.

If you’re thinking of expanding globally in 2016, Thailand should be high on your list.

With greater smartphone accessibility and usage in recent years, Southeast Asia has been on every mobile app developer’s radar for a while now for going abroad—and Thailand is a frontrunner in terms of market growth, especially when it comes to mobile games:

Considered a “future app frontier” by App Annie’s forecast earlier this year, Thailand has one of the fastest growing revenue for apps and games in the region. From 2014 to 2015, the app market saw 20% growth in combined iOS and Google Play downloads and 30% growth in combined revenue.

Thailand’s steady growth in download rates for mobile apps has now secured the country 9th place in the world for annual Google Play downloads, surpassing Germany in 2015.

According to market research firm Newzoo, Thailand’s mobile games revenue is growing 50% a year to an estimated USD $485 million industry in 2018. In-game purchases led to a 86% surge in revenue last year. This year’s mobile games revenue is expected to exceed $211.8 million, predicts Newzoo.

All this to say…

Thailand’s mobile app industry is primed and ready for growth.

Despite constant natural disasters and political instability in Thailand over the last decade, the country is now among the most ready in the region for new players to enter the scene, especially for mobile games.

Here are a few reasons why:

Thailand is a “mobile-first” market.

As residents of a World Bank “upper-middle income economy,” more and more of the Thai population can afford smartphones and are adapting quickly to prioritizing mobile in their digital lifestyles.

According to Naver Corps’ LINE brand, a heavyweight in Thailand (we’ll get to this in a second) Thai users, on average, spend about 5.7 hours/day on their mobile devices. Mobile phone penetration is at 180%, with users owning multiple SIM cards and devices. Smartphone penetration heads steadily towards 50% and will pass 100% by 2021. 4G networks are being further expanded this year.

Most Thai users move from being mobile-aware to being mobile-first in their thought process and online actions, making mobile a great first choice for an advertising channel for developers.

According to VC firm KPCB’s 2016 Internet Trends report, online buying in Thailand often occurs entirely over mobile, from social media for browsing to messaging platforms for payment. The use of messaging as a platform for monetization online will continue to be a trend in Thailand.

Investments in mobile and tech infrastructure are rolling in.

Aside from building mobile infrastructure and expanding 4G coverage, the Thai government is intent on developing the startup ecosystem as well, starting a $570 million venture fund for local startups that will finance 2,500 existing startups with the hope of raising that number to 10,000 companies in 2 years.

Google’s move in 2015 to revamp Google Play minimum pricing options in emerging markets holds a positive impact for mobile users in Thailand, making it more affordable for them to purchase apps.

Thailand is a growing hub for mobile in Southeast Asia.

As Jakob Lykkegaard Pederson, co-founder and CEO of Thailand-based Playlab game studio said, “Thailand is becoming a key market for mobile games and studios.”

This was made apparent in the decision to host the second Global Mobile App Summit and Awards (GMASA) conference in Bangkok in January this year.

C. R. Venkatesh, the managing director and CEO of Dot Com Infoway, an organiser of the event says the Thai mobile app market has great potential for generating jobs, citing the total mobile games revenue as an example. Thailand as a choice for the host site was inevitable due to its exponential growth in mobile.

“When we think about Thailand, what we see are beautiful beaches, Thai food, tourist hot spots and lovely temples. The less-known fact is the mobile ecosystem,” says Venkatesh. “Thailand is the second-largest economy in Southeast Asia and also one of the fastest-growing mobile games market in SEA,”

“Thailand is, after all, the largest market for games in Southeast Asia with a 21% share,” he adds, “and should hold the leader position until 2017.”

There is still major potential for growth in Thailand’s user base.

In 2014, there were an estimated 13.8 million mobile game players out of a smartphone user base of 20 million (total population: 67.1 million.) Close to half of those mobile players have already made online purchases through a game (45.6%).

There’s solid progress and lots of room still for new games to enter the market, for current and future gamers.

Awesome! So how do I take advantage of this growing market?

Every app market is different, with its own unique character and habits. Here are a few best practices for localizing to Thailand:

1. Design your app to work with minimal bandwidth.

Despite improvements, information frameworks and infrastructures are still relatively new and underdeveloped in Thailand. Make sure your app can be used minimally.

On the plus side, things are looking up in this area. Thailand is the only one in Southeast Asia where mobile subscription growth surpasses wifi. It also has one of the highest existing mobile broadband subscription penetrations in the region.

2. Distribute your game through popular local channels.

The Ericsson 2016 Mobility Report lists these 5 smartphone apps were most popular in Southeast Asia and Oceania, based on number of monthly active users: LINE, Youtube, Facebook, Google Chrome, and Google. In Thailand, LINE and Facebook dominate as the go-to platforms.

About 40-50% of Thai smartphone users access social networking, instant messaging, and online videos daily—one of the highest percentage of daily users in the whole region.

LINE as an example of great localization

LINE, in particular, is an interesting example of successful localization, as well as a leader of the local app market.

As one of the company’s biggest markets outside its native Japan, LINE in Thailand has taken time to develop multiple platforms and products catering to the local users’ needs (for example, separate apps for TV, music, camera, selfies, you name it.) In general, the primary user demographic in Southeast Asia is young, educated, and single. LINE’s knowledge of this led them to create features and products tailored for this crowd.

Whereas mobile games lead in revenue in Thailand, LINE tops the charts in combined iOS and Google Play downloads. In fact, 2 out of the top 10 games in 2015 were developed by LINE.

If you’re localizing any app to Thailand, consider publishing or distributing through LINE and look carefully at their localization efforts as an example.

3. Customize your marketing to local players’ preferences.

It’s one thing to know the smartphone user base, it’s another to understand your Thai mobile gamers.

“Thailand’s gamers are quite unique,” says Andy Saroj Pichayapa, a bizdev manager at Thai game publisher Ini3. As a result, western game publishers have only been successful “with the right game content.”

What he means by this is Thailand players’ preference for more Eastern-oriented content than others in the region, like Indonesia or the Philippines. Racing games top the charts continuously and RPGs are broadly accepted. Many users prefer graphics and artwork in the Japanese/Korean style, suggests Pichayapa.

We know changing in-app graphics can be costly, but it might give your game a huge boost to localize your marketing and app store graphics to attract more Thai users.

4. Adjust to local app pricing averages

With about 87% of game developers making their revenue from in-app advertising and 53% from in-app and virtual purchases, getting your players to download your app is an important part of localization.

The $0.99 price that most mobile games ask for in app stores isn’t considered reasonable in all countries in the region, especially in Thailand. USD $1 is approximately equal to 35 Thai baht, which has a much greater purchasing power in Thailand than USD $1 has in America (street food Pad Thais can go as low as 30 baht—or USD $0.86!)

So, to attract gamers in Southeast Asia, you’ll have to reduce the price to the local standard. Pederson suggests lowering the price to a more affordable 29 baht (about USD $0.84.) It will encourage more users to buy the game because it’s cheaper and it makes more sense (35 is a more random number.)

As mentioned before, Google allows developers to adjust their price depending on region, which may explain why Google’s Android platform takes the lead in mobile gaming in Southeast Asia.

5. Facilitate easy payment processes through local payment channels

The next step after convincing Thai gamers to purchase your app is to make in-app purchasing easy and stress-free. This means getting to know the local payment norms of wherever you’re localizing and matching user expectations.

In Thailand’s case—and for Southeast Asia in general—credit card penetration rates are low and mobile users are generally uninformed or skeptical of using them to make purchases online. Instead, the local payment channels of choice are prepaid systems, i.e. game cards or payment gateways.

Another method could be providing your players with well-timed info. Playlab tries to overcome payment barriers by adding info pop-ups to their games, which ensures gamers know how to safely make in-app purchases directly on their phones and are encouraged to spend more within the app.

6. Plan for deep localization over the long-term if you want to be at the top.

Thailand’s English proficiency ranks very low in the world and only about 27% of its population speaks English. Western games that have seen the most success when localizing to Thailand have all committed to full localization for their games. These games represent half of the top grossing games in Southeast Asia and 35% of top games in Thailand.

Local users expect games to be in Thai, instead of English.

King and Supercell are the most dominant Western publishers but some smaller indie studios have seen success as well, like Playlab (Pederson himself left Denmark and moved to Thailand to start his own business.)

If you have an unlimited budget, go all out with a full game translation. If you’re short on time or cash, we suggest starting with a Minimum Viable Localization (MVL) strategy and scaling up to full localization once you acquire more users.

7. Respect local culture and bureaucracy

Even as an established leader in Thailand’s app market, LINE recently ran into trouble with the local government over “culturally insensitive stickers” in their messaging platform. You can execute good damage control, but it’s better to avoid this situation altogether by doing some research into local politics and cultural norms ahead of time or establishing partnerships with local influencers to mitigate cultural barriers and better understand gamers’ behaviors.

What are you waiting for?

By the looks of it, Thailand’s growth still has many miles left on its runway. We hope that these tips can give you the head start you need to localize to this exciting new market.

To learn more about the whole process of localizing your game, check out our step-by-step Beginner’s Guide to Mobile Game Localization:

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