I'm a solo developer from South Korea. I started coding about seven months ago. I can read English, but writing sentences is still difficult without a translator. I can't read Chinese at all.
My app, Party Picker, supports 10 languages. AI translated the Chinese text: Simplified for Mainland China and Traditional for Taiwan. I wrote about this in an earlier post, "I barely speak English. My app ships in 10 languages." Korean is the only language I can check properly.
A native Chinese speaker left a comment on that post. They suggested two checks and a different heading for the result screen.
Checking the Chinese files
The first check was to look for Simplified-only characters in the Traditional Chinese file (zh-Hant). The second was to convert the Simplified file with OpenCC's s2twp option and compare that result with zh-Hant.
I hadn't received feedback about the Chinese text before. I didn't expect someone to look at it.
The character check found 0 Simplified-only characters.
The OpenCC comparison was less clear. Out of 696 strings, 124 were different. At first that seemed like a lot to fix. But according to the checks, most were places where my zh-Hant file already had more natural Taiwan wording, such as 設定, 偵測 and 逾時.
OpenCC was wrong once too. It changed 訊號一出現 to 訊號一齣現.
So I couldn't just replace everything that was different. There were still some strings to fix after going through them.
What I changed
I fixed 32 strings: 10 Simplified and 22 Traditional.
Some were words used in Taiwan. 提交 became 送出 for "submit", and 拖動 became 拖曳 for "drag".
The balloon game had a different problem. Players inflate a shared balloon until it pops, but the text used 戳破 / 戳爆. Those mean poking it to make it pop. I changed the text to say that the balloon pops.
"Remember it!" was 記住了, which reads like "I remembered it." It became 好好記住！
For the result heading, I used the suggestion from the comment: 天选之人！ instead of 选中的就是你！. It means "The chosen one!" and works when one person or several people are picked.
There was also a rule translated too literally as "ties at the selection boundary". I changed that to "if a tie affects who gets the penalty".
I still needed AI to check
I can't look at 提交 and 送出 and decide which is better. I asked four different AI models to check the suggestions, then picked the changes based on those checks.
It's not the same as a native speaker reading every line. I still can't read the result myself. But before that comment, I had no way to check it at all.
The Simplified-character check is now part of my translation script. It runs when OpenCC is installed, along with the existing checks for missing keys and broken placeholders. I also added a note that zh-Hant uses Taiwan wording. It isn't just a character conversion from Simplified Chinese. Examples in the notes are 设置 → 設定, 默认 → 預設 and 视频 → 影片.
The German question
Another commenter on the same post asked about long German words.
I already had an overflow widget test. It opens 26 screens at 360×640 with text scaled to 1.6×. At the time, it only tested four languages.
After that question, I added Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese. The test now covers eight languages. All eight pass.
How many people read these posts
These are my dev.to numbers as of November 5, 2026:
| Post | Views | Comments |
|---|---|---|
| I hated apps full of ads, so I built my own. Then I added ads. | under 25 | 2 |
| I barely speak English. My app ships in 10 languages. | 59 | 6 |
| I shipped my app to 178 countries in 10 languages. One person outside Korea installed it. | under 25 | 2 |
| AI writes my code just fine. It still couldn't draw one person. | under 25 | 0 |
The language post has the most views and comments so far. It is still 59 views.
I still can't check Japanese, Spanish, German, French, Indonesian or Portuguese myself. I don't know what else needs fixing.
When I get stuck again, I'll probably write about it here.
You can find Party Picker on Google Play.
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