Guide · Localization Screenshot localization, the parts machine translation gets wrong.
TL;DR. Translate captions, not brand names. Watch for character-density blowup in
German and Russian (text gets 30-50% longer). Right-to-left languages (Arabic, Hebrew) need mirrored
layouts. Japanese and Chinese pack tighter — captions can grow smaller. Always review the locales
your top markets read in by hand; auto-translate the rest.
The 39 App Store localizations
Apple's App Store Connect accepts screenshots in 39 localizations: Arabic, Catalan, Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, four English regions, Finnish, two French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Malay, Norwegian, Polish, two Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Slovak, two Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Vietnamese. Screenshotify supports all of them with one-click AI translation, but auto-translate is a starting point — never the final word.
Where machine translation breaks down
- Brand names and product nouns ("Inbox Zero", "Habit Streak", "Pro Mode") often get translated literally to weird-sounding compound nouns. Always lock these in source language and exclude from translation runs.
- Imperative verbs in CTAs. "Tap to start" might translate to a polite-form imperative in Japanese that nobody uses in app UI. The native tone for app CTAs is often informal; machine translation defaults to formal.
- Plural forms. "3 tasks" works in English; in Polish, Russian, Arabic the plural form depends on the number. Generic translation gets this wrong silently.
- Gendered language. German, French, Spanish, Italian — auto-translate guesses gender. "Welcome, user" can land as masculine when your audience is mostly female.
Character density per language
Same caption, different visual weight across locales:
- German, Russian, Ukrainian, Hungarian, Finnish: +30-50% character count vs English. Words don't break easily. Reduce font size or shorten captions for these locales.
- French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese: +10-20%.
- Chinese (Simplified/Traditional), Japanese, Korean: -30-50%. Captions look sparse if you keep the English layout; consider denser typography.
- Thai: No word separators. Don't rely on word-break CSS — design for natural line breaks.
- Arabic, Hebrew: Right-to-left reading. Mirror caption alignment (right-aligned), but device frames and decorative elements should keep their visual layout — only text flow flips.
Font support
The system font stack handles most locales out of the box, but watch out for:
- Custom font in your captions? Verify it includes the locale's script. Most marketing fonts lack Arabic, Hebrew, Devanagari (Hindi), Thai, and most CJK glyphs.
- Inter (our default) covers Latin, Cyrillic, Greek, Vietnamese. For Arabic, Hebrew, Hindi, Thai, CJK — fall back to system fonts. Screenshotify does this automatically.
- Faux-bold and faux-italic on missing weights look terrible in CJK and Arabic. Either supply the right-weight font or change to a different font for those locales.
The honest tier of locales
Realistically, most apps over-invest in some locales and under-invest in others. A reasonable triage:
- Hand-review: en-US, your home locale, and whichever 2-3 locales make up your top non-English markets (often Japanese, German, Brazilian Portuguese, Spanish for global apps).
- Auto-translate + smoke-test: the remaining 30+ locales. Glance through each in the editor's language switcher, fix anything obvious.
- Skip entirely: Apple lets you leave locales blank; it falls back to your default. Skipping a locale you can't review is honestly better than shipping bad copy in it.
Translate in the editor → AI translation feature