The Dangers of Localizing your iPhone app
As many of you know, I spent the last week in Poland. Most of my time was spent in Zakopane attending the Junulara Esperanto-Semajno (Youth Esperanto Week), a gathering of around 200 young Esperanto speakers from around the world. So, how does this relate to iPhone localization?
Well, on the way back, we stayed overnight in Kraków and I wanted to visit the main market which is Rynek Główny. I was a bit surprised to realize that I already knew the word Rynek, because of the Polish localization of Dominion Minion which has Czarny Rynek, the Polish translation for an interesting Dominion card called Black Market. Black Market is an interesting card which changes the nature of a Dominion game a bit and lets you buy cards which are not active in the current game (for more details, see: boardgamegeek).
So, how is this dangerous? Well, I got into a cab and wanted to ask to be taken to the main market:
- Czarny Rynek, proszę!
Of course, this got a rather strange expression from the driver, since I had just asked to be taken to the black market! Fortunately this wasn’t a location known in Kraków, so I quickly corrected myself and we were on our merry way. I just can’t imagine what interesting adventure we could’ve gotten into had the driver actually taken us to some black market!
Fortunately I also had the iPhone app, OffMaps on hand, where I had the exact location we wanted marked as a pin which I just showed to the driver. This app shows a map where you can pre-download maps of places you plan to be abroad, so when you arrive you won’t have to pay exorbitant data roaming fees to see a map of your current location… it will just rely on your iPhone’s GPS.
If you need to localize your iPhone apps, check out the services we provide at iPhone-i18n.com, providing app translations exclusively for the iPhone.