Through spreadsheets to the stars: the story of TransferGo

Founded in 2012, TransferGo is one of the top UK money transfer companies with more than 800,000 users around the world. Since they signed up with Lokalise in January 2018, their localization workflow has undergone substantial changes.

TransferGo representative Vytautas Šernas shared their experience with Lokalise, emphasizing the challenges they had and revealed how Lokalise helped to overcome them. In about 8 months, they have completely moved from an obsolete Excel-based localization process to a lightweight and convenient solution using the Essential plan.

Spreadsheets and hassles

Before Lokalise, TransferGo had to struggle with spreadsheets and external translation companies. If a translation was required, they created a spreadsheet in Google Sheets and shared it with some minor explanations. Also, there was a dedicated translation manager, who communicated with third parties and got back with the translation. Then he updated the so-called master file by copying and pasting the text.

Doing translations this way was quite expensive, not to mention time-consuming. The third-party companies had a very high limit for the minimum order volume per language. Thus, translating just a couple of sentences was either impossible or came at a very high cost. At some point, TransferGo realized that the translation quality was not really good.

The whole workflow was quite terrifying, so the company started to look for other solutions. There were many reasons why TransferGo wanted to use translation tools. Improved convenience, better translation quality, reduced cost. Basically, all the reasons one can possibly think of. They needed to implement a better workflow and start saving developers’ time.

Search process

As innovation is one of TransferGo's top priorities, which means trying new things all the time, the search process started immediately. TransferGo tried around five or six translation tool providers. Some of them demonstrated the tool, showed them how it worked in a real-world environment.

They tried every tool for at least a day. And once they found Lokalise, that was the moment when the developer said: yeah, this one is cool, we have everything we need for our day-to-day operations. Tick all the boxes and off we go.

Lokalise solution

TransferGo started with the main product because most of the development happens there. And in less than one week they had it in production. What they did was simply import the whole project into Lokalise, and then streamline this into their continuous integration process. So now, before each new release, they fetch the new data from Lokalise. Vytautas outlines that there was an instant benefit: they found all the duplicate keys in no time at all, reused existing translations, then ordered extra translations for the new features. TransferGo got a lot of value for their main product.

Speaking of iOS and Android applications. Before Lokalise there was no localization for mobile apps. The webpage was multilingual from the beginning, but the apps had been only in English. Vytautas mentioned that they wouldn’t even dare to try translating their apps. However, with Lokalise it became more of a process-oriented task: check if the translations were correct, not too long, and so on.

TransferGo teams are now encouraged to improve the localizations more often. Sometimes the enhancements may be as simple as slightly improving the copy. Since it is not in their native language, the product managers have no idea if it is incorrect. Such changes apply immediately by copying and pasting the search string and editing. This would be a headache with the old workflow. Managing it all in Excel, creating bugs for developers, who need to pick them up and include the results into the release. The whole process would take days, but now TransferGo can do it on the fly.

Results

In less than a year, TransferGo:

• got rid of worksheets
• created 5 projects in Lokalise with more than 5000 keys for 9 languages
• came to handle 95% of all translations using the Lokalise localization software
• freed up developers’ time and improved the workflow