Language Translation Services for iTunes Applications

Designed and implemented backend services that allow for an iPhone application to search and translate iTunes application’s descriptions. The mobile app user can enter a search string that is send to a backend service. This service checks in its local cache for the search string and returns matches.

If a match is not found or the cache has expired then the service queries the iTunes API to get results which include applications and their description based on the searched string. This information is then cached on a centralized server and returned to the mobile application. The user can then select an application from the results and select preferred language to get the description of the application.

The language and application id is sent to the server which then queries its local cache or uses google translate API to get the translated description and then returns the results back to the mobile application. We used server-side caching to limit requests to the APIs which ultimately helped in better response times and also monetary savings for the client as requests to the google translate API cost money.