How to translate App Store screenshots without breaking them

Running your captions through a translator takes a minute. Everything that goes wrong afterwards is a layout problem, and layout problems in a language you do not read are the ones you ship without noticing.

Write the glossary first

Before translating anything, list every term that must not change:

• Your product name
• Feature names you treat as proper nouns
• Anything trademarked
• Words you use in a specific technical sense
• Brand taglines that are deliberately untranslated

A translator with no context will render your product name into something that means the right thing and is wrong, and you will not catch it in a language you cannot read. This list takes five minutes and prevents the single class of error you cannot self-review.

Feed it as explicit guidance rather than hoping. Good machine translation follows a glossary well; it just has to be given one.

Then deal with length

This is where most of the damage happens.

	Typical vs English
German, Finnish, Dutch	Noticeably longer
Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese	Somewhat longer
Japanese, Chinese, Korean	Shorter
Arabic, Hebrew	Varies, often shorter

A caption box sized to an English headline will wrap to three lines in German and float in white space in Japanese. Both look like mistakes.

Three ways to handle it, in order of preference:

1. Design the English caption short enough to absorb expansion. If English fits in two lines with room, German usually fits in two lines without. This is free and prevents most of the problem.
2. Let type scale within a bounded range per locale, with a floor so it never becomes unreadable.
3. Override the specific caption for the specific locale — a shorter phrasing that means the same thing. Use sparingly, since every override is a thing to maintain.

What does not work is a fixed-size text block and hope.

Right-to-left is a mirror, not a swap

Arabic, Hebrew and Urdu — the three RTL languages in the App Store's locale set — flip the layout. A device on the left with text on the right becomes a device on the right with text on the left.

What has to mirror: the overall arrangement, text alignment, the direction arrows and chevrons point, and the reading order of any sequence.

What must not mirror: the screenshot itself. Your app's UI is a photograph — mirroring it produces a product that does not exist. If your app has a proper RTL build, capture it separately; if it does not, keep the original screenshot and mirror only the layout around it.

Check the font has the glyphs

A font missing CJK, Cyrillic or Arabic ranges renders tofu boxes — empty rectangles where characters should be. In a shipped screenshot this is mortifying and completely invisible to anyone who does not look.

Check every locale's rendered output, not the source strings. The strings are always fine; it is the rendering that fails.

Review what you cannot read

You will not catch a bad translation in a language you do not speak. You will catch every layout failure, and those are most of the damage. For each locale, look at the rendered set and check:

1. Does any caption wrap to an unintended extra line?
2. Is any text clipped, overlapping the device, or running off the panel?
3. Did the RTL locales actually mirror, or just change the words?
4. Any tofu boxes or fallback-font characters?
5. Is the product name still the product name?

That last one catches the glossary failure, and it is worth doing even if you supplied a glossary.

Keep one source

The model that survives: one design, rendered per locale, with overrides only where a translation genuinely needs different layout.

A folder of per-language design files diverges within two releases — someone fixes a caption in English, the other five keep the old one, and nobody notices because nobody reads them. One source means a change lands everywhere or nowhere.

The full pre-flight list is the localization checklist, and if you are still choosing markets, start here.