Japanese App Store Screenshots: Why Direct Translation From English Doesn't Work
Localizing your app for Japan? If you just ran your English screenshot text through Google Translate, swapped the strings, and shipped it, your japanese app store screenshots are almost certainly broken in ways you cannot see from outside Japan. Wrong fonts. Suffocating line height. English punctuation embedded in Japanese sentences. Tech-app text that switches typeface mid-word.
This is the second post in our typography-and-localization data series. The German companion post showed how German expands (longer strings, more vertical space). Japanese does the opposite. It compresses the character count but increases visual density per character. Both languages break naive English layouts, just from opposite directions.
The TL;DR
Japanese app store screenshots fail when designers treat them as translated English. Japanese characters occupy roughly the same horizontal width as English (fewer characters, but each is about 2x wider), so the text block looks similar in size but becomes visually denser. Without increasing line height from 1.4 to around 1.7, switching to a CJK-aware font like Noto Sans CJK JP or Hiragino Sans, and replacing English punctuation with 「」、。, the screenshots read as machine-translated and unprofessional to Japanese users.
