Taking the tax (and cost) out of app localization: Multilingual App Toolkit

As a developer, there’s a bit more to localizing your app than just doing a right click | add French, but the Multilingual App Toolkit (MAT)—Microsoft’s app localization add-in for Visual Studio—takes the headache out of getting your apps localized and made available to a world-wide audience.

What you get with the MAT is a workflow for localization of Windows, Windows Phone, or traditional desktop apps with minimal effort. MAT includes built-in machine translation from Bing Translator as well as auto-translation with high-quality Microsoft user interface translations from the Microsoft Language Portal. The portal contains terminology and translations from already released Microsoft products: Windows, Windows Phone, Office, Xbox, Visual Studio, Dynamics, and many more—in over 100 languages. And it’s all free.

Why bother localizing your app?  Because you can capture another 80% of the world’s population by adding a few additional languages, dramatically increasing your reach, downloads and revenue potential. Your app may be market-specific, but most likely has worldwide appeal so why not expand your audience?

The Multilingual App Toolkit runs on Visual Studio 2013, including the free Express versions.

Learn more about the latest MAT features in this new video by Channel 9 ‘s CodeChat with Cameron Lerum and Jan Nelson from the MAT team: