Featured Customer shapr_logo

Shapr’s tech team ships 12 days faster by automating the localization process with Lokalise

"We learned quite a few new words through our use of Lokalise. That gave us the idea of doing little internal quizzes during lunch break, to help our French team get a better hold of the English we use in the app!"

Jonathan Rogez

Chief Product Officer

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Key integrations used with Lokalise

"The automated translation suggestions save hours and hours and hours of guesswork."

Shapr is the new standard for networking. They help people in the US, Canada, and Europe meet new people to grow their network, find new jobs and opportunities, get inspired, and even make new friends.

Shapr is taking the "work" out of networking with a simple and powerful matching algorithm and swiping interface. Their app is available in English, Spanish, and French.

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Challenge

Localization was a major pain point for Shapr. At the time, the company was not using any localization solution (such as translation management software), which inevitably led to endless revisions and delays. For example, an app release was put on hold for a whole week because of the typos in one of their officially supported languages.

Even though Shapr is a French company, 80% of their users speak English. Thus, maintaining an excellent English-language version of their app is crucial. It became clear that the complete flexibility and control over the languages is needed if they plan on providing the best service for their customers. They also believed that there had to be a solution to minimize the time that developers had to spend handling text content.

 

Solution

Jonathan Rogez, Chief Product Officer, realised that developing an internal solution wouldn’t be efficient and insisted on switching to a cloud-based TMS. When a friend of Shapr’s CEO heard that, he didn’t hesitate to recommend Lokalise. After a short period of testing, the company subscribed to the Lokalise Pro plan and has since forgotten about localization hassles.

The current localization workflow is much more pleasant and enjoyable than before. The product owner and design team pass draft texts in English to the developers, who then push the new translation keys to Lokalise. Later the Product Owner reviews, changes, and provides translations to other languages.

Immense amounts of time were saved by having the ability to localize the app during the Apple App Review process. In addition, their tech team saved dozens of days by not having to spend a single minute on localization after the initial setup phase.

Some of the features that the Shapr team enjoys the most:

  • Mobile SDK insights
  • Inline suggestions
  • Translation memory