95% of applications developed in Israel are written in English. Only 5% of applications, intended for the domestic market, are written in Hebrew. Israeli application developers do not target their work only for the English-speaking market, but translate them into other languages. According to a survey by One Hour Translation, 90% of applications in Israel are translated into other languages, besides English.
Most applications are translated into several languages at the same time. The most popular language is Spanish, into which 50% of applications are translated, followed by French and German (40% each); Russian, Norwegian, and Portuguese (30% each); Italian, Dutch, Mandarin Chinese, Japanese, and Korean (20% each).
Of the translations sampled by One Hour Translation, 40% were business applications for the promotion of various brands, 30% were for games (excluding gambling), and 30% were for gambling.
40% of the translated applications were translated into Spanish and Portuguese by Israeli companies targeting the Latin American market; 35% of the translated applications were translated into European languages, including German, French, Italian, Dutch, Spanish, and Russian. 20% of applications were translated in Asian languages - Japanese, Korean, Mandarin Chinese, Taiwanese, and Hindi; and 20% of applications were translated into Scandinavian languages - Norwegian, Swedish, and Finnish.
"Israel is still not considered a target market for application developers. Popular games and business applications are not translated into Hebrew," says One Hour Translations VP marketing Yaron Kaufman. "In addition, there is the problem of aligning text right, which requires the application developer to make many changes to the interface. In many cases, the effort is not worthwhile for them, and they forego the Israeli market and Arabic speakers markets."
Published by Globes [online], Israel business news - www.globes-online.com - on July 22, 2013
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