Translate App Store Screenshots to Japanese

A single Japanese headline often mixes kanji, hiragana, katakana and Latin letters. The W3C Requirements for Japanese Text Layout (opens in a new tab) describe "solid setting": ideographic, hiragana and katakana characters sit in square frames of equal size with no extra spacing between them.

There are no spaces between words, so a line can break almost anywhere. That freedom is why automatic wrapping in a caption box so often lands in the wrong place.

Japanese line breaking follows kinsoku rules. JLREQ section 3.1.7 lists characters that must not start a line, and section 3.1.8 lists opening brackets and similar marks that must not end one.

• Closing brackets such as 」 and ）
• The ideographic comma 、 and full stop 。
• The middle dot ・
• Iteration marks such as 々
• The prolonged sound mark ー
• Small kana such as ッ, ャ and ョ

Take a Japanese headline meaning "Organizing photos, made easier." in a narrow box. A naive wrap can push the final 。 onto a line of its own, or split a small ッ from the kana before it in a katakana loanword such as the one for "desktop". Insert manual breaks at natural phrase boundaries instead of relying on the text box.

Japanese punctuation such as 。、「」 is full-width and takes a whole character frame, as the punctuation character classes in JLREQ (opens in a new tab) define. Machine translation and copy pasted from English sources often leave half-width marks behind, which looks careless next to full-width text.

Mixed Japanese and Western text (a product name, "Pro", or a number like 4K) is its own topic in JLREQ section 3.2. Pick one convention for spacing and digit width, then apply it across every slide.

Often by character count, rarely by space. The W3C article Text size in translation (opens in a new tab) uses "desktop" as its example: the katakana spelling has one character fewer, yet it typically takes up much more horizontal space.

Katakana loanwords are where this bites hardest. Feature names borrowed from English (sync, widget, dashboard) become long katakana runs, and every glyph is wider than a Latin letter. Japanese glyphs are also denser, so they need a slightly larger size and more line height to stay legible on a phone-sized thumbnail.

Budget caption boxes by rendered width, not by counting characters. See the text expansion guide for a per-language comparison.

JLREQ covers both writing modes. It associates vertical text with newspapers, novels and general magazines, and horizontal text with official documents and most educational material. Software interfaces, including iOS and Android apps, are laid out horizontally.

Keep store captions horizontal to match the app UI inside the device frame. Rotating a horizontal text layer 90 degrees is not vertical writing: the glyphs lie on their sides and punctuation ends up in the wrong position. Use real vertical typesetting from a design tool only as a deliberate stylistic choice.

StoreLocale has one Japanese target, code ja. Exports land in a ja folder inside each platform directory of the ZIP, and you upload the same PNG set to ja in App Store Connect and ja-JP in Play Console. StoreLocale does not upload to either console for you.

• Text detection and translation of on-screen strings cost 0 credits, and you can edit every Japanese string before generating.
• The AI repaint that redraws in-app UI text costs 1 credit (Standard, 1K), 2 (Pro, 2K) or 4 (Ultra, up to 4K) per screenshot. It is generative, so glyph shapes and fonts can drift.
• The editor's caption fonts are Latin display families, so Japanese caption layers render with a fallback CJK font. Check the weight and style of that fallback against your design.

If you add the ja localization without uploading Japanese screenshots, Japanese users see English images. App Store Connect Help (opens in a new tab) explains that a new localization starts out with the primary language's screenshots until you replace them.

1. No line begins with 。、」 or ー, and no line ends on an opening bracket.
2. Punctuation is full-width throughout, and digit and Latin styling is consistent across slides.
3. Katakana terms match the words used in the shipped Japanese build, for example the same term for "settings" or "sync" on every slide.
4. The register is consistent: polite sentence endings and plain headline style are not mixed within one set.
5. Repainted UI text has no missing strokes, invented kanji, or leftover English fragments.
6. No glyph renders as an empty box, and the fallback font does not clash with the Latin brand font.
7. Prices, dates and units follow Japanese conventions where they appear in the UI.