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.
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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.
"The ability to machine translate or bring in external translators during a time crunch is critical." Tyler Brown, Software Development Manager
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.
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.
"Teammates finally have one place to go when updating or modifying translations across multiple products."
Specialized stresses four major ways of how Lokalise helps them:
"If you are looking to use a single tool that is cloud-based, has a modern UI, supports automation via API calls and webhooks, Lokalise is your tool."
Our current workflow in Lokalise: when a copywriter populates all 3 languages, we trigger a CI pipeline, which exports iOS and Android localization bundles and integrates them into our application repositories. We use a separate github public repo to push/version all localization files. Pretty simple.
Lokalise has a very user-friendly interface, the filters and tags are extremely helpful in keeping everything organized and the in-line editor which synchs in both directions is a very neat little tool. Even just being able to attach screenshots to provide context has been a huge timesaver. Overall, Lokalise does exactly what it's supposed to do and the constant development has improved the software already so much over the time I've been working with it. However, the most noteworthy thing is the outstanding customer support that deals with questions and issues in record time.