Translate your Microsoft Store release notes in your app's own voice

Why translate What's new at all

Microsoft's Store policies ask you to localize your product's description in every language you declare, and the listing docs recommend a listing for each language your app supports. What's new sits on that same page. An English paragraph in the middle of a German listing looks like nobody's minding the app.

Doing it by hand means translating the notes somewhere else and pasting them into each language's listing, every release. A plain machine translation also tends to get the tone wrong. Your German listing might say du and the translation switches to Sie, or your playful English turns stiff.

How StoreFast learns your app's voice

When StoreFast syncs your app, it reads the live listing and writes a short style profile for it. The profile covers who's speaking and how, the formatting, phrases you repeat, the formality in each language, and a glossary of names that stay in English. Here's an example of one.

Voice:
- Speaks as "we" and talks to the reader as "you"
- Short, friendly sentences
Formatting:
- Short headings ending in a colon, "-" bullets, no emoji
Languages:
- German: du, relaxed
- French: vous
- Japanese: polite (desu/masu)
Glossary:
- Keep "Notely" and "Quick Note" in English

You'll find it in the app's settings. It's written again when your live listing changes, unless you've edited it, in which case your version stays. You can also type your own notes about the style and StoreFast tidies them into the same sections without adding anything.

What a release looks like

You drop the package, and while it uploads you write the English. Last release's notes are shown as a starting point. Then you press Translate all.

New:
- Quick Note opens faster
- Notes sync in the background
Fixes:
- No crash when pasting images

For a German listing that uses du, you'd get something like this.

Neu:
- Quick Note öffnet sich schneller
- Notizen werden im Hintergrund synchronisiert
Fehlerbehebungen:
- Kein Absturz mehr beim Einfügen von Bildern

Each language has its own tab with a character count. If you change the English after translating, the other languages are marked as out of date, so you can translate again before you submit.

Three layouts

The Store shows What's new as plain text, so the layout is about which characters you type. You pick one per app in its settings, and every language follows it.

• Plain is sentences with no bullets.
• Dashes is short headings and - bullets. It's the default.
• Markdown is # headings and - bullets.

Other ways to do it

Partner Center's CSV export and import is worth knowing about if you change a lot of listing text at once, since every language is a column in one file. You still fill in each column yourself.

Who it's for

Questions

Which languages does it translate into?

Every language your Store listing has. You write the English, and StoreFast reads the rest of the list from your listing in Partner Center.

What if a language doesn't come out right?

Open it and edit it, or write it yourself. A language that couldn't be translated keeps the English, and the dialog tells you so before you submit.

Can I change the writing style it uses?

Yes. The style is in your app's settings. Edit it however you like, and once you've edited it, StoreFast keeps your version instead of rewriting it from the listing.

Does it translate my description and screenshots too?

Yes. On the Store listing page, Translate missing fills the description, features, search terms and screenshot captions in every language. Screenshots are uploaded once and used for every language.