Why it's important to translate your app

During the years that I worked for Italian agencies and companies I always noticed that most of the people prefer to read in their native language e ofter ignore or skip content that is in foreign language.

Ofter times website and app offer only one language without the possibility to change it, or worse, they were built without the infrastructure to add more languages.

With the more recent web apps, apps and open-source libraries it's even easier to integrate a system that helps with the content translations. This does not only help your users but also the development and maintenance of the software built.

In my opinion, these are the main pros to integrate a translation system:

• Adding a new language is extremely easy.
• All you text content are separated from the rest of the app.
• The possibility to give translation files to external translators.
• You can change a label used in all your app only by modifying it in a single file.
• You can choose to use different text based on other factors (same app with different name, etc.).

The only "problem" is the time used to integrate a translation system, thankfully there are a lot of great open-source libraries online that helps like react-translate (for React).