If you own a smart phone (Blackberry, iPhone, Droid, etc.), chances are you not only know what an app is, but you have downloaded one, two, or even dozens. Want to find a place for Sushi in New York, there’s a mobile application for that! How about a speech recognition Mandarin translation tool for your next trip to China? Yep, there’s an app for that, too!
According to an independent study commissioned by GetJar, an app marketplace and rival to Apple’s App store, downloads of applications could increase to almost 50 billion by 2012 from about 7 billion in 2009. If you develop your mobile application for English-readers/speakers only, you could be missing out on huge numbers of downloads.
Read more about the role of localization in multilingual application development in the current issue of Global Communicator.
