Wonderful news to welcome: up from now Crowdin is even more accessible to internationalization and localization! We implemented the best ICU syntax support on the market, considerably mature localization tool, which can advance high-quality translations for your projects. Just check it out!
Since target texts get modified in terms of its gender and plural forms, number, time, and date, ICU Syntax provides better support for mentioned features to express all the necessary spelling and grammar details. Hence, it is a paramount element, which standardizes subtleties of the string although tends to perplex inexperienced translators.
Therefore, string localization is more challenging than ever.
Crowdin recognizes ICU formats and with a help of really handy Pre-view option makes it possible to observe different variations. Syntax is also highlighted so it is very convenient to keep required areas within the sight and manage translations swiftly!
It let translators minimize mistakes, review defined message structure, and quality of the ultimate translation outcome.
We did our best to come up with ICU syntax support and are really happy to share this amazing thing with our users! Select, Plural, Number, Date and Time formats are on hand to test and smooth away any issue one could have before.
Plural
Plural format is determined to handle plurals form variations. It is known worldwide that languages may differ significantly regarding their plural categories, hence some of them do not actually use all plurals form. Each language has its own list of keywords (for example, “one” and “other” in English). Obviously, this is a true mitigation of the translation complications which can arise from this kind of localization.
Select
Select format is used when one need to choose from a range of gender variants, it picks up some phrases such as male or female form of the word from the provided keywords and modifies it in the needed way. It alleviates gender localization concerns and hastens the procedure.
Number
The purpose of number format is to display different number values such as percentage. This method shows the number as a percentage and attaches the output with a percentage sign.
Date and time
Data and time types form date and time according to the locale needs. One can set up 4 values - short, medium, long, and full. Each is responsible for a particular month representation as well as time categories. You can also specify the value manually.
This aspect comes in handy when content is formatted due to the preferred format of a certain target language.
One of the perks that significantly reduces confusion is that the platform itself helps you identify potential mistakes notifying that there is a “Syntax error” and showing expected characters. Thus one can forget about wild guesses.
Still thinking whether to give it a try? Contact us right away, we will gladly give you a hand with ICU set-up and show the perks of usage. You already know everything about our novel feature, so no time for hesitation, let’s explore Crowdin ICU syntax support today!
Crowdin and Desk.com are in the same league which means a mitigation of the pitfalls that users experience when trying to deal with translations of the Knowledge base.
Why this integration is so significant?
The answer is simple - it’s high time to forget about the time-consuming processes of copying the information and importing it manually into Crowdin. Right now, Crowdin keeps track of all Topics and Articles you have on Desk and refreshes the content on the platform at top speed.
The same happens when some changes are implemented on the Crowdin side: when the file is completely translated, it is automatically sent to Desk in the short run or even faster if you find the immediate sync option handy.
Crowdin integration with Desk.com is an excellent feature which ease the localization of the Desk content for every member of your team!
Smooth, agile, and user-friendly! This integration is the thing that will make you forget about mundane procedures and provide a quick way of setting.
Developers and localization managers are the part of one tight unit now, because Crowdin integrates with GitHub and Bitbucket for all the organizational Crowdin subscriptions!
This means that all the new texts from pull requests are sent to localization at no time, all the translations are downloaded automatically and available for review at GitHub or Bitbucket and all this is synchronized and automated.
Here are the opportunities available with the GitHub/Bitbucket integration:
Instant Synchronization
When integrated with GitHub or Bitbucket, Crowdin instantly “listens“ to the changes in the repositories and takes out all the latest texts into the specific branch in Crowdin. This nimble process helps to shorten the release cycle, as well as keep all the source texts changes up to date in your version control and translation systems.
If you are GitHub user and you got used to Crowdin CLI to send files back and forth, we’ve just made this process much more easier with new integrations. No custom scripts or complex console commands anymore.
Translation Commits
When translations are finished and your languages are ready to go live, Crowdin sends pull request with translations to you version control system. For every branch that is under localization, Crowdin creates additional localization branch with translations. We do not commit directly to master, so that you have a chance to verify translations and keep your app safe and sound.
Integration
Integration is pretty straightforward, all you need to do is:
to authorize the access to Crowdin account from either of two version control systems;
select repository and branch(es) that are supposed to be localized;
write simple configuration via UI, telling what should be placed where.
Find out more about integrating GitHub and Bitbucket
It all works thanks to webhooks that let the services communicate. In short, they let apps like Crowdin push updates directly to other apps right when they happen and vice versa. So changes in your files will sync between platforms in the real time.
Each team manages their localization projects differently, so GitHub/Bitbucket integration with Crowdin is meant to be flexible enough to fit into any workflow and to provide a seamless process for anyone who needs to be part of project localization.
Today, we are announcing the in-built QA check tool. It will help your proofreaders do not waste their efforts, guarantee higher quality of translations, and save your manager’s time.
Here's how it works.
Crowdin QA check spot mistakes, basing on the number of parameters. Auto fixes and Validators already reduce the number of possible errors during the process of translation in the Editor. However, translation upload allows the space for errors to slip in the final translated document. That is why, Crowdin QA check offers manager to make sure that the program will work as expected with all the new translations.
To start with, you have to define the scope of the QA check you want to be tested on a single field. Before this, go to the Project Settings, Translations tab, and turn on the QA check feature.
Clicking Save will check the translations according to each selected parameters. You will see the results as following:
The languages where mistakes were detected will be noted with the sign of exclamation mark.
Click View in order to see the strings in the project that require attention in the proofreading mode.
Don’t let these cumbersome mistakes stand in the way of your success. Ask the proofreaders to eliminate them and confirm that the translation is free of faults and can be further used with no worries on the matter.
By the way, the QA module always works in the background. There is no further need to use external Quality Assurance Tools for running QA check and spend extra time switching back and forth between the tools to edit segments. What is more, Crowdin QA check requires no additional expenses. That clever tool is available for organization subscription plans simply as an additional feature which helps to ensure the quality of the translation output.
We will continue focusing our efforts on refining the built-in QA tools. The following update will provide advanced terminology and spell checks.
We'd love to hear your thoughts on what works good and what we can improve. Let us know how to make your localization management and collaboration easier.
Quickly translate few strings or answer translator’s question on the go - this is where mobile interface is useful most of all. Translation issues and comments, task managements alongside with proofreading are now much easier to handle from your phone.
With Crowdin optimized for mobile, it’s easy to reach anybody of your team to discuss the ongoing translation questions and deal with the emergencies at once.
With the current hectic pace of life, it is very crucial to be flexible and manage things even if your laptop is not with you.
Crowdin is a great tool for working with software translations, but in most of the cases, localization management still requires a stand-alone computer in the agile development.
Phones, on the other hand, are not perfect to work particularly with localization, but they’re handy with browsing and simple one touch actions.
Both project managers and translators are welcome to use Crowdin on mobile to their advantage when there is a lack of time or some burning issues are waiting.
Translation editing as well as creating comments and issues with a couple of touches become convenient for translators when the deal should be solved immediately.
Project Managers can also use their phones to keep up with the latest updates on the projects’ matter, coordinate the translation process, and always stay in touch with the team.
We made our mobile interface even more user-friendly and responsive, so you can surf the platform in a smooth way. Simple UI and touch optimization let you focus on the main operations (translate, approve, and comment) without wasting your time.
Communication is possible regardless of the location what enables you to feel confident about the course of things.
Here and now, it’s easy to do your job from mobile on the go!
The new Version Control feature we introduce today can significantly reduce the delay “after development before deploy” that usually agile companies struggle with. Time saving is achieved by letting translators work in parallel to developers. Generally speaking, every string created or modified by developer becomes available to translator almost immediately. Even if there are several teams working on different improvements.
The only thing that we strongly recommend you to consider in your development workflow is the agreement with developers do not commit texts to the code repository if they are most likely not going to be used in a final product. Otherwise, there might be some overhead and translators will work on the texts that may never appear in the released product.
The new workflow Crowdin recommends to implement:
This is how Crowdin CLI command looks like if you upload source texts from the branch:
crowdin-cli upload sources -b {branch_name}
That new branch is visible to translators also but contains only difference comparing to the “master” branch. Depending on the workflow you set, translators get notified about the new texts and start working. When the development is finished and developers “merge to master”, the translations can be downloaded from Crowdin as the following:
crowdin-cli upload sources -b master
crowdin-cli download -b master
More about integration and How To Guide
This new feature will also become the great helper for companies that maintain several versions of the same product, for example one can have product 6.x still supported along with 7.x. Crowdin Versions Control allows to translate and review identical texts from both versions only once and the translation will migrate to others. This is great efficiency improvement comparing to the traditional way of solving the problem with Translation Memory.
New Localization Vendors: More Translation Opportunities
Translations as most important part of your internationalization effort just got more vendor options in Crowdin.
We’ve picked vendors up carefully considering software translation experience and expertise.
Now you have more choices, take a look (Project settings → Vendors):
E2f is one of the translation agency recommended by Apple Developer community.
Strong sides:
App localization;
Project management;
Localization testing.
Tomedes is one of the vendors verified by Google Play Developer Console, as translation agency for Android apps.
It has the most experienced translators for app and software translations and 24/7 human support.
Strong sides:
Android, iOS localization;
Games localization;
SEO and Keywords localization;
E-commerce localization;
Educational translation, e-learning;
Documentation translation and localization.
Bureau Translations offers dedicated Project Management and works with a small carefully picked and managed pool of Bureau certified linguists, what guarantee quality.
Strong sides:
Software and website localization;
Documentation translation;
Project management;
Globalisation Consulting.
Web-lingo specialises in South African, African and European language translations. One of the Microsoft translation vendors.
Strong sides:
Website localization;
UI translations;
App localization.
Verbalizeit provides efficiency due to complete automation of translation workflows across all mediums of communication.
Strong sides:
Mobile apps localization;
Web app localization;
Document and marketing translations.
We will continue adding more vendors and integrations that you might need in agile localization process.
We’d love to hear what you think, let us know in comments.
Whitepaper: Hows and Whys of Crowdsourced Translation for Android App Localization
Get to know how to:
Сrowdsource translations for Android
Avoid potential pitfalls
Prepare your App for localization process
Choose localization technology
Find crowd translators
Motivate translators
...and more
Crowdsourcing supposed to be a powerful method for Android localization.
Except - how often does that happen?
Developers choose crowdsourcing mainly because it sounds perfect to get translations for free. But the lack of awareness about all the crowdsourcing aspects leads to fail.
This whitepaper will help you to be aware and avoid potential challenges. It will be your guide through crowdsourcing whys and hows for Android apps so you can be prepared for the ups and downs it may bring.
This 14-pages whitepaper covers:
Crowdsourced localization overview;
Steps toward applying crowdsourced translations in the Android app localization process.
We're excited to announce a new integration with a Poedit, the legendary translation tool for Gettext resource files.
This integration makes the collaboration for Poedit users way easier. Now every translator that uses Poedit inside of one project, can synchronize his/her work with Crowdin as a central place that manages translations.
The combination of Crowdin and Poedit also reduces the need for translators to deal with localization files manually. Using the integration, the updated source files can be pulled from Crowdin to the Poedit automatically, as well as translations are being saved in the cloud with one click.
“This integration allows translators to leverage the new era collaboration tools directly from Poedit app they are used to and even lets them work offline when needed. Crowdin also makes the project managers much more efficient, I can’t imagine handling Poedit’s 70+ translations without it anymore myself” — says Václav Slavík, the creator and lead developer of Poedit.
Fresh Crowdin’s editor and new Workflows: already in action
Today, we’re releasing new workflows and translation editor that is much more modern and much easier to use.
Editor UI: refreshed
Have a look:
Considering design trends and feedback from users, we’ve tried to make the new editor:
more user-friendly and intuitive;
faster;
clean and with “flat” UI.
The enhanced editor performance, advanced navigation and other little things will make the translation process even more smooth and consistent.
See it in action here.
Major new features and improvements:
Advanced text search. You can now search separately through: strings, context or translations and with a possibility to look for exact strings matches in their specific combinations.
Better user experience when translating text with plural forms.
Changes feed for each separate string.
New custom filter “Approved by User” and ability to keep track on who approves or disapproves translations.
Smoother usability on tablets and mobile devices.
Most popup windows and confirmation dialogs have been replaced with handy “Undo” button. (It eliminates a lot of mouse movement).
Lots of improvements in the proofreading mode. (Access to the translation memory, as one of them).
To see more details of new editor UI changes check out screenshots we’ve prepared.
Custom Localization Workflows
Now you can define your custom localization workflow that can involve several proofreading stages and automatic pre-translation. That feature has been frequently requested by our big clients as they often have at least two verification steps for translations, one on the vendor’s side, the second is in-house (by QA or Marketing team).
More about Custom Workflows
We are excited to hear what you think. So enjoy the updates and share your feedback in comments!
Overcoming the challenges of mobile game localization
with comments from Tom Whiteley, the Producer in Ndemic Creations
Rapid growth of app store popularity becomes a pot of gold for game developers. Now it is so easy to make your games accessible for million of people worldwide, just with one click in app store and its transfer your game to a part of the progressive $ 26,3 billion global mobile game market (Global Games Market Report Newzoo, 2014).
But pay attention to the word “global”, it’s a bit unrelated to your game, right? If you want to reach fully global market as well, you just can’t stay in one language and one country. The only right way here is to localize your game and make it available to new users around the world.
Game localization process is complex. It intersects with some challenges that can be crucial in achieving the success.
Challenge #1. Target languages, where are you?
According to App Annie research, the number one language across Google Play and IOS App Store is Japanese. But English and Korean are also the most profitable languages in mobile game localization. Combination of these three languages accounts the 75% of profits made by games on Google Play. Also, China and Taiwan with their Simplified and Traditional Chinese have huge markets for iOS games. German and French are finishing up the top ten profitable languages list, and if you want to get real growth in the global market you should certainly include Russian, Spanish and Portuguese. The number of game downloads in these languages is big and only getting bigger.
It, actually, should be the first question you scrolled in your mind because languages you choose to localize your game will affect your future success in the global market.
Think about strategy, which markets would be more profitable for you, in which countries gamers haven’t seen your game before and where competition is not too strict.
Challenge #2. Build a team
There are two ways you can translate your game: crowdsourced translations or professional translations. Choosing the one you should consider pros and cons of each.
It isn’t a rocket science for now to find a freelance translator or company that provides localization serviсe - network is full of professional vendors and translators who can help you make the localization process easier. But the real challenge is finding someone you can completely trust your product and who can offer accurate service in localizing into many languages.
Crowdsourced translations
Pros:
Localization is cheaper when you involve the community to translate your game;
You become closer to the actual users and listens to their feedback;
Fast turnaround time: the more contributors the faster the process;
Opportunity to get more brand ambassadors for your product worldwide.
Cons:
Continuous motivation program for translators requires time and effort;
Deadlines cannot be defined forward as you can’t force your volunteer translators to contribute translations on time;
Doubtful translation quality: your translator can be fluent in few languages, but it doesn’t mean you’ll get high quality, grammatically correct translations.
Professional translations
Pros:
High quality translations confirmed by certificates and translators experience;
More control of the process timing;
Optional proofreading.
Cons:
Expensive;
There is no deep understanding of the game: translations can be perfect on the linguistic side but poor in terms of game style.
In any case, hire a proofreader who would be native in target language and qualified enough of your game to make translations accurate. And admit, two pair of eyes and one more fresh head is always better.
Challenge #3. More than translation
If you want to get high-quality translations, your translation team should be completely aware of the game universe. You can always get good translations without this nuance, but, in this case, you risk getting poor and dry translation, without game style and even with a chance to repel the user. You might not even think that something is wrong while your fans have been already leaving.
We asked Tom Whiteley from Ndemic Creations that is dealing with localization of Plague Inc: Evolved to give us a feedback on what are the necessary things about translations for games. Here is what we found out:
"For us the most important factor in creating a high-quality localisation is using translators that really understand the game and indeed the gaming universe. Plague Inc. has its own unique style, and the players fully understand this and are most able to translate this style into new languages", - says Tom, Producer at Ndemic Creations.
It is best not to give access to the game translation content until translation team will know your game history and all characters of it. Let them learn everything about your game, even why pigs are flying, or horse can ride the bird. Provide your translators with game description, glossary list and screenshots, and you’ll see then the best translations ever.
Challenge #4. Make it faster
Game localization is slightly slow and thorough process that should be completed in a short terms. In most cases, time allotted for localization is barely enough to translate and proofread the content at least once. While for getting efficient translations it is needed to proofread it for 4-5 times, not even including checks on the test.
In game localization is believed that in order to speed things up, you should start localization process as early as possible. But according to our expert Tom Whiteley it doesn’t work in practice all the time when crowdsourcing, in most cases it can be implemented using professional translations. However, if you intend to do it with crowdsourcing it can be troublesome for you:
"Keeping your crowd motivated is essential. If you start the localisation process too early, then it can be difficult to keep your best translators engaged throughout the whole process. Strings will always change during development, and changing strings that translators have already translated means part of their hard work has gone to waste. You have a limited time span that each translator will be engaged, so you need to maximise the impact of this", - says Mr. Tom.
Your localization team should provide a huge amount of translation and proofreading work in really short terms. To do everything efficiently and on time they should spend not too much time for reviewing the game materials. In this case, provide your translators with your game concepts, early experience and important materials for helping them make translations along with your copywriters or narrowly with them.
Challenge #5. Culturalization
So, knowing how to deal with these localization challenges will allow you easily call your game definitely “global”.
We used to laugh at other localization fails when some titles sound funny or even offensively in different countries. Therefore, if you don’t want to find yourself in a similar situation you should learn everything about country you choose for game localization, even its essential history stages and cultural aspects that would affect your new users.
Understanding of basic information about the country you want to localize on namely its history, culture and lifestyle can help you to avoid crucial localization missteps. Use your native speaker translators as reliable cultural assistance and let them provide useful comments during the whole localization process. You also should be ready to change a large part of your content or even all jokes and specific expressions, as it is too sensitive to provide accurate humor by just translating it. In this case, you can only trust your translators with adapting or creating new jokes that will conquer your new users without losing the original style.
Thanks to Tom Whiteley, Producer at Ndemic Creations for his expertise about how to make game localization efficient and overcome challenges that occur on the way. Almost 12 languages live in the Plague Inc: Evolved right now and there are also more than 20 languages underway. Here is what Tom has to say about his experience working with our localization management platform:
"Using Crowdin to localise Plague Inc: Evolved has given us a great opportunity to engage with our community and work with some highly talented people from all over the world. The players that want to help translate Plague Inc: Evolved are often experienced gamers and extremely passionate about the game, which helps ensure a high-quality translation”.
Have anything to add? Looking for your input in comments.
Custom languages, new wordcount algorithm, improved reports and more
Custom Languages
It was one of the most frequently requested features. From now on, you as a manager can create custom target languages. The usual use cases:
Adding not real languages (like Pirate English, LOLCAT, Klingon, etc.). Quite popular in tech geek communities and gaming world.
For rarely used dialects. Yes, Crowdin might not support some of them.
Not translation purposes. Sometimes our customers use the extra languages for proofreading of source texts or similar things, now it’s much easier to add those languages.
This feature is in beta right now. To use it, find it here: Project Settings → “Translations” tab → “Target languages” button → Create Custom Language item in the list of target languages (the very last item).
If you’re not our beta user and would like to use custom languages, you can join here.
Tuned Word Counter
The main goal of this improvement was to make a word counter more industry compliant.
On the technical side: now Crowdin counts only consistency of letters, numbers and special characters, it does not count HTML tags and the URLs will be considered as one word. More about new word counter.
Main value for you as a manager is that you can be more confident sending invoices to translators, the numbers become indeed more accurate and “honest”.
New Activity Report
Crowdin developers did a great job implementing the new Activity Report. Besides it looks great, it is also a wonderful instrument to give you quickly a picture on how your localization project goes. See the brief description and some screenshots below:
Translation Activity — shows the number of translations done, how many of them were made by machine and how many translators contributed that day;
Indicators that compare current metrics to the metrics of the previous month;
Language Statistics — amount of translations for each language daily;
Source String Activity — the quantity of added and deleted strings in the project;
Number of Translators
Translation Forecast — approximately predicts when translation into the language will be completed;
Minor changes:
Project page become much faster;
Now it’s much easier to invite project managers and promote other participants to the manager role;
Simplified Translators management, more powerful, looks better;
Mass remove feature in the Abuse Report;
Cover pictures for your projects page/company page.
Alphabetical sort order in the editor;
Concordance search is not case sensitive now;
Preserving filters and search results when switching language in the editor;
Improved integration to the machine translation engines (placeholders are not translated);
Improved auto-translation of duplicated texts;
That’s all for now. Your comments and feedback are much appreciated as always.
New prices. Beta is over. Moving to the .com domain
New Prices
Today we are announcing a price increase for Crowdin.
Here’s the new pricing structure:
Personal plans
Organization plans
All existing customers will be able to maintain their original prices indefinitely. Plan upgrades will be available at the new prices.
If you currently have a free trial account with us, we recommend to buy the subscription before Sep 1st 2014.
Crowdin goes out of beta still having "Beta Features".
Why Crowdin is still “beta” was probably the most common question we were getting from our customers. The answer is simple: we were doing lots of research and experiments while developing the tool.
Back then, when we started, most of the Crowdin users were tech-geeks and adding new features was more important than stable solution, so the “beta” label was completely OK.
But now, when we’re hosting over 11,000 localization projects and have more than 250,000 registered users, the stable and reliable solution is the requirement.
Do not worry, we still will continue to experiment and innovate. But the process changes a bit.
From now, all of the Crowdin users will get only stable features. If you would like to get the latest features we’re working on, can join our Beta Program.
.net → .com
We also move from crowdin.net domain to crowdin.com. This migration should not affect you much, the API calls will still work with the old domain. When accessing Crowdin via browser you will be redirected automatically. The only thing, if you have email filters configured you need to change the domain name there.
If you have any comments or questions, please get in touch.
Gross domestic product (GDP) of the USA in average grows for 3% per year. This is quite a tempo, and the index is pretty much the same among all developed countries.
What interesting is that this growth is almost entirely about technological progress.
With innovation and automation, people have wider possibilities and more time to produce more goods. And yes, this macroeconomics principle can be applied to any business.
So we're excited to share some recent improvements within Crowdin.
More translation vendors
From now, you can choose among five integrated translation vendors:
OneHourTranslation
Gengo (new)
Translated (new)
Alconost Inc. (new)
Babble-on Inc. (new)
More options, a wider choice - better localization result.
Semi automatic screenshot tagging
The feature allows to tag screenshots just selecting the area where the strings should appear and Crowdin recognizes the text that goes along.
It makes screenshot tagging process easy and reduce the need to search manually for strings and resize the space the string should belong.
Batch translations upload
You can now upload existing translations (those made outside Crowdin) all at once, with no need to go through every file and language.
System automatically detects the file to apply translations and the target language or in some cases (unknown or rare target language, the translation file consist of different languages, etc.) asks to define those characteristics manually.
The feature is useful for those who migrate to Crowdin and for those who continuously get translations from outside Crowdin project (e.g. translations come from third party agency but the project itself is being managed in Crowdin).
Translating text segments without files
Now Crowdin allows to add text segments for translation by creating them right in the UI.
Typical use cases:
Your localization file is not being generated automatically but created manually by developers. Now your devs can do this directly in Crowdin, new texts appear to translators immediately.
You just need to translate a bunch of texts (as texts from the graphic content or AdWords campaign)
The translated files can be downloaded in CSV format only.
Other improves:
Mobile friendly interface (both project page and the workbench look great on mobile now);
Yandex.Translate - new machine translation engine has integrated;
MediaWiki file format support added;
More straightforward revisions history;
Improvements to the Translation Memory engine;
YAML files support improved;
Files tab in project settings page improved (batch files delete, performance improvements for big projects);
Significant improvements to the MS Office documents support;
Improved threads in private messages and workflow notifications from Crowdin;
Usability and visual improvements in Crowdin In-Context tool;
Minor improvements in project settings page.
Stay tuned, subscribe to Crowdin blog and be the first to get fresh updates.
The functionality of Chess.com home grown localization solution was not enough to cover translation environment and the translation software low input threshold, so they started to look for way round which stumbled them onto Crowdin.
The idea was simple: to find the place where Chess. com huge community can work together to translate.
Taking little steps they started with Android mobile app around 2000 words in total. The project was translated in over 40 languages for less than 3 weeks. Now 196 contributors are taking part, the number of translated languages reached 53 languages and counting.
We asked Erik to outline top three features that Chess.com loved about our solution the most and which can be a real aid in managing similar localization projects.
An answer was:
“...1) Amazing User interface (the progress is visible, and the users like it a lot);
2) All of the features I could want for accountability and reporting;
3) Easy import/export functionality…”
Which is really flattering.
Why did Chess.com decide to let end users take care about localization ?
“For us, we need community members because they know the names of our products and also very specific chess vocabulary. We tried another service before with "professional" translators and the translations made no sense to chess players. ” - says Erik.
This emphasizes the crucial importance of translators competence in specific software terminology and the layouts.
The approaches Chess.com used to motivate volunteers are quite uncomplicated. They simply invited people to apply to be translators and then chose the best ones. As Erik indicated: “Community members are doing it for the love of the game, for the community and their friends, for free memberships, and for some cash :)”
Conclusions
Summarizing Chess.com experience here are some numbers that shows the dynamics of localization process:
Project Type: mobile app
Project contributors: 196
Completed target language: 53
Time spent: 4 weeks
Costs: $29 per month
Total cost: $29
Translators salary: acknowledgment, free memberships, recognition among community
In comparison to localization via translation agency the total cost is approximately 8 times bigger per single language.
So savings for Chess.com project is somewhere around $200 per language and $10600 per whole project so far, excluding languages that are still under translations.
Crowdsourced localization main benefits:
- speedy translations;
- cost reduce;
- reactivity: newly added texts are being translated within hours;
- increase users loyalty and engagement;
- translations made by experts of the specific software area;
- lots of target languages.
Is Chess.com planning to move forward with localization to other projects via crowdsourcing?
Yes, next step would be an IOS application and the web application itself.
So, Crowdin can be a fair assistance to automate translations migration across mobile apps and in-context localization for web application.
We wish Erik and the community a lucky break. Hope a good example will be followed and reproduced by others.
Crowdin gives wide range of possibilities to provide contextual information to translators. We allow to upload screenshots to show where the text segment is being used in real product, comment segments, create glossary to highlight and explain important terms, collaborate on choosing best translation and more.
JIPT allows translators to do their work right in the live application, immediately preview translation in original context thus produce best possible quality localization. All of the texts that are visible in browsers can be translated this way (including ones stored in the database).
Under the hood
You start with regular Crowdin project by uploading localizable resources and optionally integrate Crowdin to your development process.
Practically the integration is all about the few steps you can find in Project Settings under “JIPT” tab.
Using your localization files Crowdin produces pseudo-language package that should be integrated to your application as an extra localization language.
We recommend to integrate JIPT with your staging or dedicated translation environment installation (but you can integrate it with your product also by providing special translation mode like Facebook does).
Next step is the one-line JavaScript library integration.
The pseudo-language integrated earlier contains special identifiers instead of original texts, thus when switching your app to that language all of the labels become not readable… for human. The JavaScript search for those identifiers through the pages and replace them with editable labels.
So translator does not see any difference between live app and app with integrated JIPT. But the tool knows what part of the app is translatable and provides all of the means to let translator localize in-context.
The translation process is accomplished via minimized regular Crowdin translation page with all the functionalities(proofread/vote option, comments, terms, etc). Additionally it is easy to review translations for proofreaders and assure quality for QAs that way.
The best part of this approach is that it’s technology independent. If you can localize your web application with Crowdin, you can do so with JIPT. The approach also does not involve proxy servers.
What is moreover it is possible to localize dynamic parts of the application: dynamic dialogs and messages that appear in the runtime. Same with the content stored in the database.
That’s it. No coding, no heavy changes in your application.
Eventually, Crowdin is the only provider of such solution since it is based on the patent pending technology.
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The Translation Management Service @crowdin-blog - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag
