Specialized and Lokalise: riding towards global success with 100% teammate enthusiasm

Teammates finally have one place to go when updating or modifying translations across multiple products.

Specialized is a US-based leading global cycling brand founded in 1974. Specialized products fall into three categories: cycling equipment, bike equipment and the bikes themselves. Among the bicycles produced by the company, there are models of almost all the main types of bicycles: from professional road and mountain bikes to amateur recreational, children's and even electric bicycles.

Problem

Bikes and cyclists can be found in every corner of the world. Being able to deliver the message in their native languages is a requirement for developing an authentic market presence. Specialized has sales and marketing offices around the world, with collaborative teams that are willing to perform translations.

However, being enthusiastic is not enough. As Specialized grew, especially in the digital space, the requests for translations grew as well. The process was a mix of documents and tools, which led to much longer translation and revision cycles. Spreadsheets, word documents, outsourced translation firms - none of these were able to significantly improve the translation and localization process. The absence of a clear structure and a single localization space kept creating more chaos. Specialized team members and developers were determined to find a way to simplify and streamline the process.

Solution

During the search and test of several online tools, Specialized found Lokalise. The team was pleased by the overall simplicity and flexibility of the tool, so Lokalise became widely adopted across the company.

Lokalise received praise from Specialized global teammates. Not only did the number of tools required for a successful localization decrease to one, but the turnaround time became much faster.

Specialized stresses four major ways of how Lokalise helps them:

• Specialized internal resources can be used with domain knowledge to translate
• Lokalise allows the use of machine translations or external translators in a pinch
• Translators and developers can access the content easily
• API and webhooks give developers the ability to automate the localization workflow