I was wondering if you were planning on doing different language options in the app; and if crowd sourcing the translations would be a good idea?
I can speak basic to intermediate Norwegian and can read / write some basic Japanese and was wondering if any of them could be useful?
That’s actually a really great idea and is probably something which could help growth quite a bit.
Honestly, this hadn’t crossed my mind. But now that you mention it… this is a great idea. 
As to when and how… we need to find our feet first, and I don’t know the best way to go about it. Maybe a once-over with Google Translate, and then open it up for improvements…?
One concern is customer support/dynamic FAQs, which will be English-only for the time being… a Japanese app with English support could get confusing. Conceptually it’s straightforward, but internationalisation can get messy.
Anyway, thank you for the idea, Rosie! It’s got my vote. When learning German and French, I’d translate everything on my phone to help things along…
It’s a great idea google translate is an obvious first step but many avoid Google for various reasons. Instagram provides translation to English of Japanese - I follow many Japanese posters. It’s not without problems, rather like english subs on JDrama the grammar of the two languages is so different. AI is beginning to help in this area. There is a small electronic device (thumb drive in size) that will immediately translate English speech to Japanese and vice versa.
I’d be rather cautious on using Google translate. Just remember some of the gaffes that have appeared on Welsh road signs saying the translator is out of office! The automated response might come back with one thing, however there may be multiple ways to say the same thing, and the version it’s come back with might be rude.
Building the app using a translation library with translation files is the first step, if this is the direction that you want to go. Ensuring no user interface string is hard coded is the most important thing.
This 100% The nod to Google Translate was to translate some of those config files as a first step – I’d never dream of doing it on the fly! Even so, probably best going the human route…
Interesting idea down the line but it might confuse users regarding support (if they see the website & app speaking their language they might be misled into thinking they will also receive support in that language), and honestly I don’t think it’s worth spending time & money on this at this point in time. I’d rather get a rock-solid mobile network in English than an app in all the languages of the world but no network.
In anticipation of the Tokyo Olympics they now have a real time translation app capable of translating 73 languages!
I think creating a toolkit for community translations would work.
Then people could download the translations from the community, import into the app, and get a big warning/indemnity statement
Wouldn’t it be too much effort for no real return? I mean how many non-technical people would actually bother, let alone figure out how to do it? It’s not like you have to spend a lot of time in the app (in fact the point of Zevvle is that it “just works” and you won’t need to go in the app regularly).
If you set it up right, it really shouldn’t be that hard. FOSS does loads of this.
It would be an amazing accessibility feature to have this in Polish, Urdu, Somali etc. Unique really.