We're honoured to be joined by Andrea Muttoni and German Viscuso, Technical Evangelists at Amazon Alexa, to dive deep into how to translate your Alexa skill into other languages.

At the time of writing, Amazon Alexa is available in over 40 countries and 12 languages, and continuously growing.

For skill builders, tapping into emerging markets is key to having your skills used on a global scale and to growing your user base.

However, if you have a skill that's in English, you can't just point it to the Italian or German skill store. You have to localise it and translate it for those languages.

In this episode

In this episode, German Viscuso and Andrea Muttoni walk us through a step by step process of how to localise your Alexa skill.

We cover:

• Why you should localise your skill in the first place
• Front-end design considerations
• Back-end technical considerations
• Cultural differences

Andrea and German point to the importance of separating content and responses from code logic as the key to a successful localisation project. To help you visualise what that means, I've put together a little graphic that should help you picture this process visually.

This episode builds on the conversations we had about VUI design localisation with Maaike Dufour and localisation tooling with Milkana Brace and Jonathan Burstein of Jargon.

About Andrea Muttoni and German Viscuso

Andrea Muttoni is the Senior Solutions Architect and Technical Evangelist for Amazon Alexa UK and IRE and German Viscuso is the Technical Evangelist at Alexa, Spain.

Andrea and German are both more than qualified to speak in detail on localisation. Andrea was born in Italy and has lived in China, USA, Luxembourg, the UK and holds a German passport. While German was born in Argentina, lives in Spain and has an Italian passport!

They both know their technical stuff, too (obviously).

LinksContent

Andrea’s article on localisation

How to build an Alexa skill from scratch on YouTube

Find localisation source code at: github.com/alexa

Quickstart guide to the ASK CLI

Join the discussion on the Alexa forums: alexa.design/forums

Twitter and contact

@alexadevs

@muttonia

@germanviscuso

Reach out to the team at: alexa.design/contactus

Things we discussed

Crowd in - https://crowdin.com

Airtable - https://airtable.com

VUI design translation with Maaike Dufour

Localisation tooling with Jargon

 

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