September 22, 2014 at 19:32Localization of applications for the Chinese market
Actually, it is no secret to anyone that the PRC market (as well as Hong Kong and Taiwan) is a dream for any game producer. Given the excitement of the Chinese, their suggestibility and the prevalence of mobile phones among the population (as well as the number of subscribers), a successful entry into the Chinese market can bring huge profits.
In this publication, I will try to describe this whole laborious path, as well as the main pitfalls that can meet along this path. Welcome to cat.
So, you have an application that you would like to release on the Chinese market. First of all, you need to make sure that it will be in demand there. After all, many of the services that your application can be tied to will simply not be available in China (Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Foursquare, etc.), many services will work with restrictions (Google). And for many, finally, the target audience simply does not match - China strongly resembles the United States in this regard, and everything that happens outside the country for the Chinese is nonsense, not worthy of attention of the true 华人.
But let's say the application is not tied to a specific region and you are sure that the people of the PRC will be interested in and actively use it. Then proceed to the process. For convenience, I will divide the entire text into parts.
The first is the issue of localization. With the Chinese in this regard, everything is very, very bad. In the sense that it is one of the most difficult languages for localization. But first things first.
Before you either order a translation from a third-party company or hire a translator, make sure of the following:
a) all your windows, buttons, and all UI elements are scaled to fit the text. The Chinese language is extremely concise and after the translation you will have a huge amount of empty space. Compare for yourself:
京津 高 铁 - Beijing-Tianjin high-speed railway
京沪 广 邮包 - free shipping to Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou
, etc. is included in the price .
Chinese cat is stunned by the length of words in a foreign language
b) immediately transfer your application to zh_CN and zh_TW - the system locales of China and Taiwan. Since only these two locales are available for Chinese, and dialects are not supported, this is the only way out. The first is the Chinese locale and simplified hieroglyphs, the second is Taiwan, Hong Kong and, accordingly, traditional. In 99% of cases, the hieroglyphs will be the same, only in different forms. Compare, here is the translation of the word “why”:
为什么
為什麼
c) check again how the numbers are displayed in your game. The fact is that the usual numerical gradation (10, 100, 1000, 1.000.000) in China does not exist. The Chinese number series looks like (10, 100, 1000, 10.000, 100.000.000). That is, “a million” will be equal to “one hundred and ten thousand,” and, say, “50.250.100” will be written as “five thousand twenty five ten hundred thousand). One hundred million is not “one hundred million,” but “one and”. Accordingly, if you make the user think for a long time about how many products he will receive, he will not pay anything - transfer all the numbers to the Chinese display model.
d) translation of the name of the game, the names of cities, goods, in general - entrust all proper names to someone for whom this language is native. Literal translations often come up with rubbish. The most famous tale is when the first Jesuit missionaries verbatim transcribed the name of Jesus into Chinese simply by picking up the first harmonious characters that came across. The result was 亿 鼠 (And Shu - one hundred million mice). It is better to translate incorrectly, but adequately for the average resident of China.
e) the resulting result, be sure to give proofreading to residents of different places in the PRC (North, Center, West, Southeast, South). For the words "哈 喽" are often not understood by a northerner, and a pun about 金正日 是 金日成 的 儿子 for a southerner can remain just the right phrase from the encyclopedia.
The second is technical issues. Everyone knows that the user's headache does not end well for the developer's wallet. Here it is necessary not to forget about several rules:
a) completely delete all resources that refer to third-party services. There was a case when one site loaded something from Google widgets. Since the connection with Google in China is "not very", the page of the site weighing 50 Kb took several minutes to load.
b) be sure to integrate local services. Authorization through a QQ account, posting results to Sina Weibo, inviting friends from Renren, etc. It takes very little time, but the result is gorgeous.
c) pay great attention to fonts - there is no country in the world where so much attention is paid to calligraphy. For some reason, all foreign developers use SimSun as one ... Order some text-pictures to be drawn to local calligraphers, use different writing styles, etc. Do not forget that the writing standards in the fonts of China, Taiwan and Japan are different - for example, Sim Sun uses Chinese spelling, and Arial uses Japanese.
Top - Japanese spelling, bottom - Chinese
d) give the user a convenient pay. In China, there are a lot of payment systems and almost all of them are convenient to use for the user and for the developer. Do not use the services of international payment aggregators - most often their implementation of Chinese payments is not that nightmare - it causes a desire to break the phone against the wall. Alipay, Tenpay, PayEase and dozens of others - the choice is huge.
e) if your application requires access to the Internet - place the server in the place where Chinese users can quickly reach it - Hong Kong, Macau, Singapore, South Korea. In no case is Europe, the USA and Russia.
f) get ready for the fact that many sites have their own requirements for applications - if Wandoujia does not particularly monitor moderation and skips everything right away, then 91 of its requirements can drive any of the developers into wild longing.
Well, you just don’t remember. So, the game is localized, all technical issues are resolved. Do not rush, the case is not yet completed and it is too early to consider royalties.
a) games with the possibility of withdrawing money from them in the PRC are strictly prohibited - it is easier to fly out of the market because of this.
b) if the application can create content by the user - take care of censoring the content. If your application is recognized as violating these requirements - that is, if Falun Gong or Xinjiang’s affairs are discussed in a chat - you can not only fly out of the market, but also go to jail. For this, there are basic options like block lists, which can be found for free on specialized resources, as well as expensive paid enterprise solutions with a lot of additional features, updating databases, etc.
Golden police shield that protects the minds of the Chinese from Western exposure
c) study in detail the relevant legislation - in China, everything has long been developed and covered. Of the main documents, you can name 软件 产品 Мет 办法 (Methods of administration and management of software products) and 网络 游戏 暂行 管理 办法 （Methods of administration and management of online games), etc. - there are a lot of them.
d) attend to the registration of the company, the withdrawal method, etc. etc.
e) Despite the errors of many, many people in China pay great attention to copyright protection. To get a large fine due to the use of unlicensed content or photos without the permission of the model is very, very easy. Naturally, all title documents for the content must be translated, notarized and approved by the Copyright Office.
So, everything is done, it is time to start. And first we need to choose a suitable platform for distribution. If for iOS in China there are only a few stores (naturally, with its own payment APIs, with its own SDK, etc., then there are hundreds of them for Android, and for each you will have to add their SDKs, banners, splash screens with advertising etc.
Reviews of these stores, the number of users is easily searched on the Internet and their choice is not particularly difficult.After
that, you will need to withstand fierce competition from other similar products, promote your application in Chinese advertising networks, promote the site in Chinese search system ah, to register corporate accounts in the Chinese social networks, obtain additional licenses, to cheat more and more buns, etc., etc.
Well, of course, take profits. And here, with a competent approach, she is magnificent.
I hope it was interesting.
In this publication, I will try to describe this whole laborious path, as well as the main pitfalls that can meet along this path. Welcome to cat.
So, you have an application that you would like to release on the Chinese market. First of all, you need to make sure that it will be in demand there. After all, many of the services that your application can be tied to will simply not be available in China (Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Foursquare, etc.), many services will work with restrictions (Google). And for many, finally, the target audience simply does not match - China strongly resembles the United States in this regard, and everything that happens outside the country for the Chinese is nonsense, not worthy of attention of the true 华人.
But let's say the application is not tied to a specific region and you are sure that the people of the PRC will be interested in and actively use it. Then proceed to the process. For convenience, I will divide the entire text into parts.
The first is the issue of localization. With the Chinese in this regard, everything is very, very bad. In the sense that it is one of the most difficult languages for localization. But first things first.
Before you either order a translation from a third-party company or hire a translator, make sure of the following:
a) all your windows, buttons, and all UI elements are scaled to fit the text. The Chinese language is extremely concise and after the translation you will have a huge amount of empty space. Compare for yourself:
京津 高 铁 - Beijing-Tianjin high-speed railway
京沪 广 邮包 - free shipping to Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou
, etc. is included in the price .
Chinese cat is stunned by the length of words in a foreign language
b) immediately transfer your application to zh_CN and zh_TW - the system locales of China and Taiwan. Since only these two locales are available for Chinese, and dialects are not supported, this is the only way out. The first is the Chinese locale and simplified hieroglyphs, the second is Taiwan, Hong Kong and, accordingly, traditional. In 99% of cases, the hieroglyphs will be the same, only in different forms. Compare, here is the translation of the word “why”:
为什么
為什麼
c) check again how the numbers are displayed in your game. The fact is that the usual numerical gradation (10, 100, 1000, 1.000.000) in China does not exist. The Chinese number series looks like (10, 100, 1000, 10.000, 100.000.000). That is, “a million” will be equal to “one hundred and ten thousand,” and, say, “50.250.100” will be written as “five thousand twenty five ten hundred thousand). One hundred million is not “one hundred million,” but “one and”. Accordingly, if you make the user think for a long time about how many products he will receive, he will not pay anything - transfer all the numbers to the Chinese display model.
d) translation of the name of the game, the names of cities, goods, in general - entrust all proper names to someone for whom this language is native. Literal translations often come up with rubbish. The most famous tale is when the first Jesuit missionaries verbatim transcribed the name of Jesus into Chinese simply by picking up the first harmonious characters that came across. The result was 亿 鼠 (And Shu - one hundred million mice). It is better to translate incorrectly, but adequately for the average resident of China.
e) the resulting result, be sure to give proofreading to residents of different places in the PRC (North, Center, West, Southeast, South). For the words "哈 喽" are often not understood by a northerner, and a pun about 金正日 是 金日成 的 儿子 for a southerner can remain just the right phrase from the encyclopedia.
The second is technical issues. Everyone knows that the user's headache does not end well for the developer's wallet. Here it is necessary not to forget about several rules:
a) completely delete all resources that refer to third-party services. There was a case when one site loaded something from Google widgets. Since the connection with Google in China is "not very", the page of the site weighing 50 Kb took several minutes to load.
b) be sure to integrate local services. Authorization through a QQ account, posting results to Sina Weibo, inviting friends from Renren, etc. It takes very little time, but the result is gorgeous.
c) pay great attention to fonts - there is no country in the world where so much attention is paid to calligraphy. For some reason, all foreign developers use SimSun as one ... Order some text-pictures to be drawn to local calligraphers, use different writing styles, etc. Do not forget that the writing standards in the fonts of China, Taiwan and Japan are different - for example, Sim Sun uses Chinese spelling, and Arial uses Japanese.
Top - Japanese spelling, bottom - Chinese
d) give the user a convenient pay. In China, there are a lot of payment systems and almost all of them are convenient to use for the user and for the developer. Do not use the services of international payment aggregators - most often their implementation of Chinese payments is not that nightmare - it causes a desire to break the phone against the wall. Alipay, Tenpay, PayEase and dozens of others - the choice is huge.
e) if your application requires access to the Internet - place the server in the place where Chinese users can quickly reach it - Hong Kong, Macau, Singapore, South Korea. In no case is Europe, the USA and Russia.
f) get ready for the fact that many sites have their own requirements for applications - if Wandoujia does not particularly monitor moderation and skips everything right away, then 91 of its requirements can drive any of the developers into wild longing.
Well, you just don’t remember. So, the game is localized, all technical issues are resolved. Do not rush, the case is not yet completed and it is too early to consider royalties.
a) games with the possibility of withdrawing money from them in the PRC are strictly prohibited - it is easier to fly out of the market because of this.
b) if the application can create content by the user - take care of censoring the content. If your application is recognized as violating these requirements - that is, if Falun Gong or Xinjiang’s affairs are discussed in a chat - you can not only fly out of the market, but also go to jail. For this, there are basic options like block lists, which can be found for free on specialized resources, as well as expensive paid enterprise solutions with a lot of additional features, updating databases, etc.
Golden police shield that protects the minds of the Chinese from Western exposure
c) study in detail the relevant legislation - in China, everything has long been developed and covered. Of the main documents, you can name 软件 产品 Мет 办法 (Methods of administration and management of software products) and 网络 游戏 暂行 管理 办法 （Methods of administration and management of online games), etc. - there are a lot of them.
d) attend to the registration of the company, the withdrawal method, etc. etc.
e) Despite the errors of many, many people in China pay great attention to copyright protection. To get a large fine due to the use of unlicensed content or photos without the permission of the model is very, very easy. Naturally, all title documents for the content must be translated, notarized and approved by the Copyright Office.
So, everything is done, it is time to start. And first we need to choose a suitable platform for distribution. If for iOS in China there are only a few stores (naturally, with its own payment APIs, with its own SDK, etc., then there are hundreds of them for Android, and for each you will have to add their SDKs, banners, splash screens with advertising etc.
Reviews of these stores, the number of users is easily searched on the Internet and their choice is not particularly difficult.After
that, you will need to withstand fierce competition from other similar products, promote your application in Chinese advertising networks, promote the site in Chinese search system ah, to register corporate accounts in the Chinese social networks, obtain additional licenses, to cheat more and more buns, etc., etc.
Well, of course, take profits. And here, with a competent approach, she is magnificent.
I hope it was interesting.