Specialized and Lokalise: Riding towards global success with a 100% teammate enthusiasm
Company
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.
Industry
Bicycles
Type
B2C
Tools needed for localization
1
Teammate enthusiasm
100%
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.
"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.
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.
"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:
- 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
- APIs and webhooks give developers the ability to automate the localization workflow
"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."
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Lokalise is very good: the team is nice and caring about your needs and the software is awesome. A lot of features and integrations make it easy to collaborate with external translators, because the platform gives you an overview of the translation state.
Our devs add the keys, our designers review them, and we have multiple people from multiple translations companies and internal people translating our content. Seems like a nightmare, but Lokalise makes it super easy and organized.
We manage translations for Android, iOS and backend applications through Lokalise - a simple and intuitive web application. It makes us work faster and react to change almost instantly.
Lokalise is a fantastic platform, with top-notch support. You will not be disappointed.
Lokalise’s Live SDK allowed us to free ourselves from the tyranny of updating localized keys in each app release.
At Ding we are always looking at ways to improve our service and processes – Lokalise helped us to do this – we would recommend Lokalise to all prospective users.
We choose Lokalise because it’s convenient that you can write comments and attach screenshots to the translated keys. The work has become much easier for everyone.
Lokalise is a very useful tool, with great support. Make sure to use them if you want an efficient translation process.
Localization is key to enter new markets. Lokalise has helped us to streamline the process of translating our product into 18 languages.
Lokalise is really recommended if you want some easy to use, feature-rich and great customer support service for localization. Now we can update texts remotely without having to release a new app update. This is a huge advantage.
The mobile SDK is a must to keep your apps free from typos and other common localization issues. This really streamlined our workflow here at Shapr. The excellent support team has always provided speedy, helpful responses.
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.
Uploading and tagging screenshots is one of the Lokalise features I like most. This allows us to easily provide context for the translators and improve the quality of our translations. Messaging, notifications, integrations, they all contribute to providing better quality translations.
The major improvement we’ve seen is regarding the adoption rate and the praise from our global teammates. With Lokalise, they finally have one place to go to update or modify translations. With the ability to update in the same place we pull translations, turnaround time is much faster.
Localization is a difficult part of a project, Lokalise has the key features to provide a complete lifecycle and allows developers and translators to collaborate in the internationalization of projects.
Deploying Lokalise has had a huge success among all our teams. Everyone loves it. It allowed us to have a comprehensive overview of our translations and improve them rapidly.
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.
