Traducto Pro Wants To Be Your One Stop Shop For iOS And Mac App Localization

There’s plenty of money to be made if you’re an app developer pushing out quality content, but making a name for yourself in your home market is only part of the equation.

Developers that have neither the time nor the expertise to fully translate an app into another language could be missing out on plenty of international revenue, and a new OS X app called Traducto Pro aims to make sure that’s no longer the case.

Created by Brooklyn-based Visual Frames, Traducto Pro simplifies the localization process for developers looking to bring their iOS and Mac apps to new markets by providing a one-stop shop for requesting and purchasing translations for their projects.

“Developers have a hard time translating apps,” Visual Frames founder Jules Ngambo said. “Most developers don’t know how to localize, and the process could easily take between 10 and 20 hours.”

Once the app is installed, users can create an account with Traducto and either punch in text to be translated or directly import Xcode files. Translating pure text — think app store descriptions, press releases, blog posts and the like — is straightforward enough, as users can just copy and paste into the corresponding field and select one of 16 target languages for the text to be translated into.

What’s perhaps more appealing is how Traducto deals with those Xcode projects. When they’re imported into the app, Traducto picks out all of the appropriate text strings from the project’s code and resource files and sets them aside for translation. Once a target language has been selected, users are given their choice of three translation quality tiers — Standard, Professional, and the super-accurate Enterprise — along with the price quotes to go with them.

Ngambo was quick to point out that the lion’s share of the company’s revenue will come from selling those translations, but he wouldn’t budge when it came to disclosing how the translation fees charged to users would break down between his company and the multiple translation services Traducto leans on.

Rather than have users bounce all over the place to request their translations and pay for them, Traducto folds the payment process directly into the app. When the translation of those strings are complete, Traducto also re-inserts them back into the Xcode project from whence they came, a move meant to save developers the hassle of doing it manually.

The turnaround time for each part of a project obviously depends a little on how complex they are, but Ngambo tells me that projects are usually completed within 12 to 24 hours, and many are done much sooner than that. To help developers keep tabs on the progress of those translations, popping back into the projects view yields a percentage view of how far along each translation is.

After spending some time mucking about with the app, I came away very impressed by all the thoughtful tweaks that Ngambo and his team have fleshed it out with. Want to make sure that your (nameless) translator understands the nuances of your writing? Leave them a comment prior to submission, and they’ll contact you to confirm things. Don’t want to pay for translations? Provided you’ve got the know-how, you can plug string translations directly into Traducto and have them pushed back into your project from there.

For developers who would rather shell out a bit of cash instead of handle the process of sourcing translators themselves (or worse: grabbing a dictionary and having a go at it), Traducto Pro seems like a thoughtful, well-executed tool to have in their arsenal. The app is now available to developers here for $49 (and that price gets cut in half with the coupon code “PRO50“).