Localization of applications for the Chinese market
Actually, it is not a secret for anyone that the market of the PRC (as well as Hong Kong and Taiwan) is a dream for any igproizvoditelyu. 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 all this time-consuming path, as well as the main pitfalls that can occur along this path. Welcome under cat.
So, you have an application that you would like to release to the Chinese market. First of all, you need to make sure that it will be in demand there. After all, many of the services to which your application can be tied will simply not be available in China (Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Foursquare, etc.), many services work with restrictions (Google). And for many, finally, the target audience simply does not coincide - China strongly resembles the United States in this regard, and all that happens outside the country for the Chinese is nonsense, unworthy of the 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 People's Republic of China will be interested in them and actively use them. Then proceed to the process. For convenience of perception, I will divide the entire text into parts.
The first is the localization issue. With the Chinese in this regard, everything is very, very bad. In the sense that it is one of the most difficult languages to localize. But first things first.
Before you either order a translation from a third-party company, or hire a translator, make sure that:
a) all your windows, buttons and all UI elements are scaled to fit the text. The Chinese language is extremely laconic and after the transfer you will have a huge amount of empty space. Compare yourself:
京津 高 铁 - Beijing-Tianjin High-Speed Railway
京沪 广 邮包 - free shipping in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou included in the price
etc.
Chinese cat 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 the PRC and Taiwan. Since only these two locales are available for Chinese languages, and dialects are not supported, only such a way out. The first is the locale of the People's Republic of China and simplified hieroglyphs, the second is Taiwan, Hong Kong and, accordingly, traditional ones. 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 in your game are displayed. 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, the "million" will be equal to "one hundred ten thousand," and, say, "50.250.100" will be recorded as "five thousand twenty-five ten-hundred-thousand). One hundred million is not one hundred million, but one and. Accordingly, if you force the user to think long over how many goods 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 - trust all your own names to someone for whom this native language. When literal translation is often obtained nonsense. The most famous bike is when the first Jesuit missionaries literally transcribed the name of Jesus to Chinese simply by selecting the first harmonious hieroglyphs. The result was 亿 鼠 (And Shu - one hundred million mice). It is better to translate incorrectly, but adequately for the average resident of the PRC.
d) in the end, be sure to pay for the proof-reading to the inhabitants of different places in the PRC (North, Center, West, Southeast, South). For the word "喽" is 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 correct phrase from the encyclopedia.
The second is technical issues. Everyone knows that the user's headache ends badly for a developer’s wallet. Here it is necessary not to forget about several rules:
a) completely remove all resources that refer to third-party services. There was a case when one site loaded something from Google's widgets. Since there is no “very good” connection with Google in China, the 50kb website page was loaded for several minutes.
b) be sure to integrate local services. Authorization via 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 would be paid to calligraphy. For some reason, all foreign developers use SimSun as one ... Order some text-pictures to be drawn by local calligraphers, use different writing styles, etc. Do not forget that the standards of writing in the fonts of the People's Republic of China, Taiwan and Japan are different - for example, Sim Sun uses Chinese writing, and Arial - Japanese.
Top - Japanese spelling, bottom - Chinese
d) give the user a convenient pay. There are a lot of payment systems in China and almost all of them are easy 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 nightmarish - it causes the desire to break the phone against the wall. Alipay, Tenpay, PayEase and dozens of others - the choice is huge.
e) if your application requires Internet access - place the server in a place where Chinese users can quickly reach it - Hong Kong, Macau, Singapore, South Korea. In no case is not Europe, the United States and Russia.
f) Get ready for the fact that many sites have their own requirements for applications - if Wandoujia doesn’t particularly follow moderation and skips everything at once, then 91 can push any of the developers into wild longing with their requirements.
Well, I don’t remember everything. So, the game is localized, all technical issues are resolved. Do not be in a hurry, the case is not yet completed and it’s too early to consider royalties.
a) games with the possibility of withdrawing money from them in the PRC are strictly forbidden - to fly out of the market because of this is easier than easy.
b) if the application can create content by the user - take care of content censoring. If your application is recognized as violating this requirement — that is, if Falun Gong or Xinjiang's case is discussed in the chat — then you can not just fly out of the market, but also go to jail. For this, there are both basic options like block lists, which can be found free of charge on specialized resources, and expensive paid enterprise solutions with a large number of additional features, database updates, 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. The main documents include 软件 产品 管理 办法 (Methods of administering and managing software products) and 网络 游戏 暂行 管理 办法 （Methods of administering and managing online games), etc. - there are a lot of them.
d) attend to the registration of the company, withdrawal method, etc. etc.
e) in spite of the delusions of many, many, in China very much pay attention to the protection of copyright. It is very easy to get into a large fine due to the use of unlicensed content or photos without the model’s permission. 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 site for distribution. If for iOS in China there are only a few shops (of course, with their own payment APIs, with their SDK, etc., then for Android there are hundreds of them, and for each you have to add their SDK, banners, splash screens with ads to the application 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 have to endure fierce competition from other similar products, promote your application in Chinese advertising networks, promote your website in Chinese search engines, register corporate accounts in Chinese social networks, get additional licenses, wind up more and more buns, etc. . etc.
And, of course, take profit. And she here with the right approach is great.
I hope it was interesting.
In this publication, I will try to describe all this time-consuming path, as well as the main pitfalls that can occur along this path. Welcome under cat.
So, you have an application that you would like to release to the Chinese market. First of all, you need to make sure that it will be in demand there. After all, many of the services to which your application can be tied will simply not be available in China (Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Foursquare, etc.), many services work with restrictions (Google). And for many, finally, the target audience simply does not coincide - China strongly resembles the United States in this regard, and all that happens outside the country for the Chinese is nonsense, unworthy of the 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 People's Republic of China will be interested in them and actively use them. Then proceed to the process. For convenience of perception, I will divide the entire text into parts.
The first is the localization issue. With the Chinese in this regard, everything is very, very bad. In the sense that it is one of the most difficult languages to localize. But first things first.
Before you either order a translation from a third-party company, or hire a translator, make sure that:
a) all your windows, buttons and all UI elements are scaled to fit the text. The Chinese language is extremely laconic and after the transfer you will have a huge amount of empty space. Compare yourself:
京津 高 铁 - Beijing-Tianjin High-Speed Railway
京沪 广 邮包 - free shipping in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou included in the price
etc.
Chinese cat 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 the PRC and Taiwan. Since only these two locales are available for Chinese languages, and dialects are not supported, only such a way out. The first is the locale of the People's Republic of China and simplified hieroglyphs, the second is Taiwan, Hong Kong and, accordingly, traditional ones. 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 in your game are displayed. 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, the "million" will be equal to "one hundred ten thousand," and, say, "50.250.100" will be recorded as "five thousand twenty-five ten-hundred-thousand). One hundred million is not one hundred million, but one and. Accordingly, if you force the user to think long over how many goods 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 - trust all your own names to someone for whom this native language. When literal translation is often obtained nonsense. The most famous bike is when the first Jesuit missionaries literally transcribed the name of Jesus to Chinese simply by selecting the first harmonious hieroglyphs. The result was 亿 鼠 (And Shu - one hundred million mice). It is better to translate incorrectly, but adequately for the average resident of the PRC.
d) in the end, be sure to pay for the proof-reading to the inhabitants of different places in the PRC (North, Center, West, Southeast, South). For the word "喽" is 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 correct phrase from the encyclopedia.
The second is technical issues. Everyone knows that the user's headache ends badly for a developer’s wallet. Here it is necessary not to forget about several rules:
a) completely remove all resources that refer to third-party services. There was a case when one site loaded something from Google's widgets. Since there is no “very good” connection with Google in China, the 50kb website page was loaded for several minutes.
b) be sure to integrate local services. Authorization via 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 would be paid to calligraphy. For some reason, all foreign developers use SimSun as one ... Order some text-pictures to be drawn by local calligraphers, use different writing styles, etc. Do not forget that the standards of writing in the fonts of the People's Republic of China, Taiwan and Japan are different - for example, Sim Sun uses Chinese writing, and Arial - Japanese.
Top - Japanese spelling, bottom - Chinese
d) give the user a convenient pay. There are a lot of payment systems in China and almost all of them are easy 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 nightmarish - it causes the desire to break the phone against the wall. Alipay, Tenpay, PayEase and dozens of others - the choice is huge.
e) if your application requires Internet access - place the server in a place where Chinese users can quickly reach it - Hong Kong, Macau, Singapore, South Korea. In no case is not Europe, the United States and Russia.
f) Get ready for the fact that many sites have their own requirements for applications - if Wandoujia doesn’t particularly follow moderation and skips everything at once, then 91 can push any of the developers into wild longing with their requirements.
Well, I don’t remember everything. So, the game is localized, all technical issues are resolved. Do not be in a hurry, the case is not yet completed and it’s too early to consider royalties.
a) games with the possibility of withdrawing money from them in the PRC are strictly forbidden - to fly out of the market because of this is easier than easy.
b) if the application can create content by the user - take care of content censoring. If your application is recognized as violating this requirement — that is, if Falun Gong or Xinjiang's case is discussed in the chat — then you can not just fly out of the market, but also go to jail. For this, there are both basic options like block lists, which can be found free of charge on specialized resources, and expensive paid enterprise solutions with a large number of additional features, database updates, 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. The main documents include 软件 产品 管理 办法 (Methods of administering and managing software products) and 网络 游戏 暂行 管理 办法 （Methods of administering and managing online games), etc. - there are a lot of them.
d) attend to the registration of the company, withdrawal method, etc. etc.
e) in spite of the delusions of many, many, in China very much pay attention to the protection of copyright. It is very easy to get into a large fine due to the use of unlicensed content or photos without the model’s permission. 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 site for distribution. If for iOS in China there are only a few shops (of course, with their own payment APIs, with their SDK, etc., then for Android there are hundreds of them, and for each you have to add their SDK, banners, splash screens with ads to the application 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 have to endure fierce competition from other similar products, promote your application in Chinese advertising networks, promote your website in Chinese search engines, register corporate accounts in Chinese social networks, get additional licenses, wind up more and more buns, etc. . etc.
And, of course, take profit. And she here with the right approach is great.
I hope it was interesting.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/237725/
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