Expenses: Bill & Trip Splitter now speaks 10 languages
Expenses: Bill & Trip Splitter started, like most apps do, in English only. That works fine while an app is small — but the app's audience for splitting bills, tracking budgets, and managing EMIs and subscriptions is global, and a lot of that audience doesn't read English as a first language. So we sat down and did a full translation pass: German, Spanish, French, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Dutch, Brazilian Portuguese, Turkish, and Polish, across every screen in the app.
More than just running text through a translator
The straightforward part was translating the obvious UI text — buttons, headings, settings labels. The harder part was catching the places where translated text was quietly never showing up at all. SwiftUI has a subtle trap: text built from a variable or passed through a helper function can silently skip the translation system entirely and always display in English, even when a perfectly good translation exists in the catalog. We found and fixed roughly 45 of these across the app — receipt capture buttons, trip cards, paywall copy, date pickers, and more — plus a plural-handling bug where counts like "3 cards" were getting an English "s" appended regardless of which language was selected.
Getting the words right, not just present
A translated app is only useful if the words are actually correct for how people in that region talk. We paid particular attention to terms that get borrowed or mistranslated in finance apps — for example "EMI" is a very India-specific abbreviation for a loan installment, so instead of leaving it untranslated everywhere, each language got its own natural word: Rate in German, cuota in Spanish, mensualité in French, and so on. We also made sure short technical words like "Wi-Fi" or "PRO" render in Japanese and Korean script rather than sitting in the middle of a sentence in Latin letters a reader might not parse.
Even the exported PDF and CSV reports — the AI Insights summary, the Cards & Wallets report, the EMI & Subscriptions export, and Income & Budget — got the same treatment. If you share a report, it should read naturally in the language you're using the app in, not switch back to English the moment you export it.
Choosing your language independent of your device
We also added a language picker inside Settings and onboarding, so the app's language doesn't have to follow your device's system language. Pick whichever one you're most comfortable with; the app tells you to restart once so the change takes full effect, then remembers your choice from then on.
What's next
This was a full sweep, not a partial one — every screen, every exported file, every notification and Siri Shortcut phrase. If you spot anything that's still showing up in English where it shouldn't, we'd genuinely like to know — use the feedback page for the app and tell us where you saw it.