Mobile App Localization

OUR APPROACH

Translating a personal brand like TunnelBear was a challenge. Each country has different standards in terms of formality; some of the countries don’t even have bears and the concept of ‘mowing’ or ‘soaring’ was very strange for potential users. We had to apply different levels of nuances to side stories and branding to make it more relevant to the countries where TunnelBear planned to expand to.

A big team was necessary to handle the workload and variety of languages TunnelBear required to scale, including Arabic, Chinese (Simplified and Traditional), Spanish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, and Dutch. We assembled a team of over 50 – translators, editors, QA testers, localization engineers – many of whom already used TunnelBear themselves, giving us a unique, indispensable insight into the brand and workings of the company. Altogether, we localized approximately 20,000 words per language (around 320,000 words in total) in several stages including editing, functional and linguistic testing, and bug fixes.

In addition, the TunnelBear team worked intensively on adding new features to their platform so by the time we have finished the translation, the next round of updates was available and ready to be worked on. We implemented a continuous localization process which allows us to keep up with the ongoing updates.