mLocalization

The mobile games market is expanding rapidly. The markets in Europe and US are saturated already with lot of games, whereas the new markets in South America, Asia, Middle East, and Africa are demanding more and more games. One of the biggest obstacles in entering these markets is the localization of content to the local languages. Localized content is very important in these markets since most users don’t speak English well enough. While markets like Brazil, Argentine, Mexico, and China will accept only localized content, other markets like Philippine, Thailand, Indonesia, middle-east will accept English content but it’s preferable to have localized versions and they have proven to sell better!

There are also lot of developers who are making games/apps for their local market without thinking about the income that could be generated by other markets. Those products could be localized and brought easily to new markets to be monetized there.

Until now there's a shortage of localized content offered in many markets worldwide and our solution will help to bridge this gap by allowing games/apps to be localized on the fly without the need for the original sourcecode.

Why the market lacks localized content?

This is due to many different reasons:

• The developers are very busy creating their new games, and with tight deadlines, they don’t have time to go back to their source-code and localize.
• In some cases the coder of the game didn’t take localization into account when he/she created the game. That’s why in this case localization can be very difficult and time-consuming process for him/her.
• The mobile games market is still dominated by small and easy to pick games. Those games don't need any instructions to be read. Think of a racing game on mobile. Everybody knows that tilting the phone to right will move to the right and tilting it to the left will move the car to the left (or in previous days ‘4’ is always to move right and ‘6’is to move left). But recently more complicated games are in the market and one need the ability to localize and offer the game in the language of the user.

Why localization is becoming more and more important?

• The mobile games are becoming more and more complicated. Imagine how can a user play an RPG mobile game without good English knowledge.
• There was smaller penetration to non-English speaking markets. Now the new markets, which are expanding rapidly, are South American, Asian, Middle East, and African markets and localized content will be more welcomed there and more appealing to End-users.
• Service providers can compete by offering better content instead of lowering prices. Localized content will give a big advantage to any distributor.
• Many operators in the region are accepting only localized content (like the case of China Mobile or Vivo).

How can mLocalization help?

• mLocalization comes as a modern and good solution for localization. It will offer developers and distributors an easy and fast way to localize content into many different languages. No matter how you coded your application, the localization can be run easily because it operates on binary level and not on the source-code level.
• mLocalization works on the binaries level. You don’t need to give us your source code. You can keep your source code to yourself and we will work on the binaries level.

The program works in three consecutive phases: parsing phase, translation phase and reproduction phase. The mLocalization program will extract binaries and parse all the individual files witin. The program will go through all text and string references and save them. The program will produce later a string table of all strings used in all classes in all binaries. It will also produce a map of where those strings are used. This is called the parsing phase. We should translate the list of strings into one or more languages. This is called the translation phase. A person usually does this manually. We supply mLocalization then with the new localized strings and it will produce new binaries for each new language. This is called reproduction phase.

What do you as developer/publisher have? You have your source-code and your binaries. We won’t need your source-code. Just send us the binaries!

Each application has many binaries, each made specific for one or range of handsets. In some cases the application can have one binary i.e. general MIDP2, which is compatible with all MIDP2 devices, or it can have a set of 200 binaries each compatible with a handset or a range of handsets!

You need to follow the following steps:

• You send us all binaries of the application well structured in directories indicating which binary works on which handset (or series of handsets).
• We will run our parsing phase of mLocalization program. The program will retrieve a list of strings used in the application. We will call this list “String Table”. It will also sort the strings out. We will later send you this list in an email.
• You translate (translation phase) the list of strings into the new language(s). This can be done also in ZGroup Mobile and we can send it to you for confirmation.
• Once we receive/confirm the list of localized “String Table”, we will run the modifier part of our program to produce (production phase) new binaries, which include the new string list.
• We will deliver you the new binaries for inclusion into your channels. Voila! You have now new localized content.

Please note that the process is fully automated and it will work on any java mobile application whether it is a MIDP1 or MIDP2 application. Our program doesn’t have any limitation on the number of binaries or length of strings. Our program can also translate between any two different languages. The program supports also localizing applications to many different languages at once. For example if your application is in English, then you can in one instance compile new binaries for French, Germany, Spanish and Italian!

If you are interested in our product then please don’t hesitate to send us an email enquiry and put mLocalization in the subject. Please send your emails to Ms. Nesreen Al Jammal or Mr. Ramez Bali , here are the contact info:
Ms. Nesreen Al Jammal: Email: sales@zgroup-mobile.com
Mr. Ramez Bali: contact@zgroup-mobile.com

Thanks for your time. We hope that we have brought the industry a good product, which will help developers/publishers and will bring more joy to our customers and end-users.