TunnelBear

Case Study: Mobile App Localization

TunnelBear is a secure VPN service. They provide their customers with private access to the same, boundless Internet worldwide. TunnelBear wants to bring the benefits of privacy to everyone with their simple and user-friendly apps.

The Challenge: Rapid Global Expansion

TunnelBear wanted to scale and grow internationally, yet their app was only available in English. They initiated a project to expand to 16 different countries simultaneously, while keeping their brand identity and story intact across every language and culture.

Translating a highly playful brand like TunnelBear was a challenge. Each country has different expectations when it comes to formality and many languages didn’t have key concepts like ‘mowing’ or ‘soaring’—creating potential challenges for their users.

We had to apply different levels of nuance to their side stories and branding to make it more relevant to all the countries to which TunnelBear was planning to expand.

Our Approach: Grin and Bear It

A big team was necessary to handle the workload and variety of languages TunnelBear required to scale, including Arabic, Chinese (Simplified and Traditional), Spanish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, and Dutch.

We assembled a team of over 50 translators, editors, QA testers, and localization engineers—many of whom already used TunnelBear themselves. This gave us a unique, indispensable insight into the brand and workings of the company.

The Results: Worthy of a Bear Hug

Altogether, we localized approximately 20,000 words for each of the 16 languages (around 320,000 words in total) in several stages including editing, functional and linguistic testing, and bug fixes.

The TunnelBear team worked intensively on adding new features to their platform so by the time we had finished translation, the next round of updates was available and ready to be worked on. We implemented a continuous localization process that allowed us to keep up with ongoing product updates.

50

Translators

16

Languages

320K

Words

Our Software & App Localization Solutions

At Summa Linguae Technologies, we provide localization and translation of mobile apps and software, taking into account your target market, industry, programming language, and user experience.

Are you planning to localize a mobile app? Learn more about our software and app localization solutions. Or contact us below.

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