LIVE FROM APP PROMOTION SUMMIT 2014: Translating app store marketing material into multiple languages can deliver impressive results, but there are some significant traps to avoid, speakers warned at the event this morning.

Moritz Daan, app store analyst for music app developer SoundCloud (pictured), said that “the opportunity is huge, that’s what we’ve found. There are countries where we went up by 300 per cent in downloads”.

But while the company saw impressive volume increases in markets including Russia (up 376 per cent), South Korea (up 264 per cent) and Turkey (up 157 per cent), it also had “headaches” in Japan and China, which saw small decreases in volumes.

With this in mind, the advice was to “go with professional translations if you have the money. Because we found that some countries were underperforming compared with before, so try to optimise that out”.

This sentiment was echoed by Stefan Bielau, managing partner for consulting firm Dynamo Partners, who also noted the importance of understanding differences between languages when dealing with straight translations.

“If you take the English original which fits, but you get back the Russian or German one which adds 2,000 characters, you have to start cutting it back. This is something you should acknowledge when entering the translation phase,” he suggested.

Choosing which languages to target is also difficult, Bielau said, especially for small companies and indie developers with stretched resources.

“A good learning is to usually start with English, to cover a major portion of the audience out there, and then take a measurement where you see the strongest demand and cater to this audience,” he said.

With Apple requiring support for 13 languages for an app to get “global” certification, Bielau identified which tongues should be a priority for developers: English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Japanese, Korean, Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, Brazilian Portuguese, Russian, Turkish and Arabic.

And SoundCloud’s Daan also noted that multiple language support can also offer benefits in a single country: “A nice opportunity for indie developers is that Spanish and English are both used in the US, so you can double your keyword opportunity.”