You Should Translate Your App Into English... Even If It's Already In English

Your audience is only English-speaking, so you don’t need to translate your app, right?

Wrong.

When your audience is English-speaking, it’s easy to assume that it will be universally understood, and for the most part that is right, but those small differences between things like British English and American English can make a big difference.

When I started work at a British ticketing company several years ago, it was mostly geared to a British-English audience, with local customers as the primary focus. However, as the company started to grow, it became quickly apparent that the US market was a huge opportunity, and we started to see more and more customers from the US gravitating towards the platform we built.

This was good for us - the platform was already built using Stripe so could support payments from the US, and the platform had been built with timezones in mind, so it was easy for them to get going.

However even with this success, there were a handful of support tickets coming in from US customers that were not about the features necessarily, but concerned about our credibility as a company purely because of the language we used, sometimes even saying they weren’t going to use our platform because of it.

See, the phrase “organiser” was used often throughout the marketing site and application, a perfectly acceptable spelling in British English, but can easily be percieved as a typo in American English for a customer who’s not familiar with international variations on the language, where they expected “organizer”.

The first time this occurred we thought nothing of it, but over time we got at least a dozen separate reports of these typos across the site from different people, and it was clear that it was affecting our credibility with these customers.

This happened a few more times with other words, and it was clear that we needed to make a change.

• organiser / organizer
• colour / color
• centre / center
• customise / customize

Even though we still intended to only serve English-speaking customers, we made the decision to internationalise the entire application to support multiple languages - starting with English (US) and English (UK), putting it in a strong position to support other languages in the future.

As developers and techies, we’re exposed to international variations of English all the time, and a lot of different cultures, so it’s easy to forget that not everyone is as familiar with them as we are.

This is a prime example of how localisation is important, even if you think you’re only serving one language. It’s not just about translating the words, but about understanding the cultural differences in the language and how they can affect your users’ perception of your product.