Localising screenshot captions: length, line breaks and right-to-left
On both stores, screenshots are often the first thing people look at, and the captions on them are often the only text they read. A localised listing with English captions sends a mixed message. Here is how to localise captions so they still fit and still read well.
Why captions matter more than they look
Most people browsing a store page scan the screenshots rather than reading the description. A caption is a headline: it says what this screen does for the user in a few words. If the listing text is in Japanese but the screenshots say "Track every habit" in English, many users will assume the app isn't really for them.
Rule one: write short in English first
The easiest captions to localise are short ones. Aim for a single idea per screenshot, in a few words, with an optional smaller second line. Long English captions leave no room for any language that runs longer, and they're harder to read on a phone anyway. If your English captions are long, shorten them before localising rather than after.
Also keep captions as live text in your design file, not flattened into images. You'll need to swap them per language, and that's far easier when the caption is a text layer.
Text expansion: German, French and friends
The same sentence is often noticeably longer in German, French, Spanish, Portuguese or Italian than in English. German forms long compound words, which also makes line breaking harder because a single word may not fit on a line. French tends to need more words for the same meaning.
Ways to deal with it:
- Write to fit, don't just translate. A good localised caption carries the same idea in the space available, even if the wording differs from the English.
- Leave room in the layout. Design caption areas with spare width and allow a second line.
- Avoid shrinking text too far. A caption that has to be set much smaller than the English one to fit is a sign the copy needs rewriting.
- Watch hyphenation. Automatic hyphenation in design tools can split German words in odd places. Check every break by eye.
Chinese, Japanese and Korean
CJK captions usually take fewer characters than English, but each character is wider, so the line length in pixels doesn't shrink as much as you might expect. The bigger issue is line breaking.
- No spaces between words in Chinese and Japanese means design tools may break lines in the middle of a word. Break manually at natural phrase boundaries.
- Punctuation rules: a line shouldn't begin with closing punctuation such as 。、」 or ）, or end with opening brackets such as 「 or （. Japanese typesetting has established rules for this; check every line.
- Korean uses spaces between word groups, so break at a space rather than inside a word.
- Use proper fonts. Make sure your design tool is using a real Japanese, Chinese or Korean font, not a fallback that mixes glyph styles. Simplified and Traditional Chinese also need appropriate fonts, and Japanese and Chinese can use different glyph forms for the same character.
- Don't stretch with letter-spacing to fill space; it looks wrong to native readers.
Arabic and other right-to-left languages
Arabic and Hebrew read right to left, and a store page in those languages is laid out right to left. Captions need more than translated text:
- Right-align the caption and, where your layout has a direction (text on one side, phone on the other, arrows), mirror it.
- Never set Arabic letter by letter. Arabic letters join and change shape depending on their position. Some design tools don't shape Arabic correctly unless the right settings or fonts are used; if the letters appear disconnected, the text is broken.
- No letter-spacing on Arabic, which breaks the joins.
- Numbers and Latin brand names stay left to right inside the right-to-left line. Check that they sit in the right place.
- Consider the screenshot itself. If your app's interface isn't right-to-left, the captions should still read naturally; don't pretend the app is localised if it isn't.
Store specifics worth knowing
App Store Connect lets you upload different screenshots per localisation, and Play Console lets you add localised graphics per language. If you only translate the listing text, screenshots fall back to your default ones, which is the mixed-language page you want to avoid in your main markets.
A caption localisation checklist
- Shorten the English captions first: one idea per screen.
- Write each language to fit the space, not as a literal translation.
- Back-translate so you know what each caption says.
- Check line breaks by eye in every language, especially German and CJK.
- Right-align and mirror for Arabic and Hebrew; confirm letters are joined.
- Look at the finished screenshots at phone size before uploading.