Providing mobility solutions used in Europe's 7 biggest cities in 5 languages

What does every big city have in common? Traffic. Fortunately, nowadays more flexible, mobile and environmentally friendly solutions are available for consumers to get from point A to point B. And eCooltra is all about that.

eCooltra is a motor-sharing service provider that offers scooter renting services in some of Europe's biggest destinations like Milan, Rome, Barcelona, Valencia and Lisbon via their app.

They had to adapt their app in several languages as their service became available in all of these cities. And this was when eCooltra found Lokalise.

Before Lokalise, eCooltra didn't use any other localization solutions – they translated the app in text document files which, as their product manager Natalia says, was a “slow and tedious process”.

This is when they realized that they're in need of a TMS (translation management system) solution.

The most important factor that they looked for in a TMS was “the possibility to change the translation in real-time with an over-the-air SDK feature to avoid the release of an early app version,” Natalia explains. Another key feature that eCooltra's team wanted to have was the possibility to share texts that need translation between their developer and localization teams, giving different people specific contributor permissions.

And so they went on a search for a TMS system, tried out a couple of them but decided to stay with Lokalise. Why? Because both the developers and management thought that Lokalise was the easiest solution to integrate into their team's workflow.

Key features used:

• Auto-complete
• Machine translation
• Translation memory
• Mobile SDK for over-the-air translation updates
• Screenshots

When it comes to integrations with Lokalise, eCooltra's localization team is excited to make the most out of the Sketch plug-in as this is the tool that their UX and UI teams use every day.

The Sketch plugin allows the team to automatically import product screenshots to Lokalise, thereby providing translators with more context.

"When you translate text, sometimes there's a small or short sentence that belongs to a button. And if you don't have the context, it's really difficult to know what is the most appropriate translation for it.”

Natalia believes that the screenshot feature makes the translation process significantly easier by giving context and even some guidance. For example, the developers can set the maximum number of characters that can fit on certain buttons in the app. That helps translators to not exceed the predetermined number of characters.

The ease of having a straightforward localization flow

eCooltra's localization team consists of 10 people – mostly developers and some translators. Another fact worth mentioning is that eCooltra doesn't use external translators. Natalia explains that people who translate the app's texts work on eCooltra's Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese teams. The translation for them is a quick and easy process, as each member of a particular team is fluent in their team's language and familiar with the product.

The localization workflow in eCooltra usually goes as follows: developers create keys and upload them to Localise. Then they inform Natalia, the product manager. She checks the keys and then initiates the translation process.

Translations are done by Natalia's international colleagues who, besides translating, have other responsibilities. For that reason, before sending the keys to them, Natalia herself translates them automatically with the help of Lokalise's translation memory and automatic translation options like Google Translate or Microsoft Translator in every language that their app has – Italian, Spanish, Catalan, and Portuguese. “It's nice to see that Lokalise translates keys automatically or gives you translation suggestions,” she says. 

Then Natalia marks the fields that are not automatically translated as unverified and sends them to the translation teams who check and correct the unverified strings. When the job is done, the translators mark the keys as verified.

This makes the translation process notably faster. If any mistakes are to occur in the translations, the developers don't need to make redundant iterations to check and copy the corrections again and again from the translation files – they can fix the text right away in the TMS. “Lokalise is the best tool that they can have for this job,” Natalia adds.

Launching the app in even more languages? No problem! 

When asked about eCooltra's future plans, Natalia shares that they plan to launch their app in new cities and translate it into new languages like French, German and Dutch. 

They're excited to enter these new markets because they know that the localization process with Lokalise will be seamless.

Natalia certainly recommends using Lokalise to any other company that has to adapt their app to various languages.