Localised screenshots without redesigning eleven times

Translating a listing's text is a couple of hours. Translating its screenshots is where teams quietly lose days, because captions were placed by eye, type was sized to fit one specific English phrase, and German turned a three-word headline into a two-line overflow. Almost all of that cost is decided by layout choices you make before the first translation arrives.

Design the caption band for the longest language, not English

German and Russian run roughly 30 percent longer than English; Japanese and Korean are shorter but need different line-breaking and more vertical room per line. Fix a caption band with space for two lines at your chosen type size and design the English version to use one. Then every translation drops in without a redesign. Auto-shrinking text to fit is the wrong fix — it makes some images' captions smaller than others, which is exactly the inconsistency that makes a set look cheap.

Localise the interface inside the device too

A translated caption over an English interface tells the visitor the app itself is not localised. If your app supports the language, capture the screens in that language — a scripted run through the app with the locale switched is far faster than editing images afterwards. If the app is not localised, translating only the captions is arguably worse than leaving the whole listing in English, because it sets an expectation the product does not meet.

Pick languages by market, not by count

Eleven localisations of a listing for an app that only ships in two markets is busywork. Look at where installs already come from, then at where the category has demand and weak local competition. Japanese, Korean, German, Brazilian Portuguese and Spanish are consistently high-yield for consumer apps; adding a language whose store you have no intention of supporting generates reviews you cannot read.