How Confirm goes live with new languages in 8 days
"To add a new language was mind-blowingly easy. It was like eight days end to end, from introducing the new language getting the strings translated, going through QA and then live."
Key integrations used with Lokalise
Results
- 8 days to go live with a new language
- Zero customer complaints related to localization
- 9 languages and counting
About
Confirm is a fast, fair, and simple-to-use employee retention and performance management solution that stops you from burning time, money, and culture. Use science and data, instead of manager bias, to spot your true top performers so you Promote, PIP, RIF, and retain the right people. In a world of doing more with less, you can reveal the performance data you need to maximize your largest investment – your talent.
TLDR
Driven by clear market opportunities, a commitment to equity, and customer demand, Confirm sought to implement an efficient and seamless localization process. With Lokalise, they were able to quickly set up smooth and collaborative localization workflows between developers and quality assurance teams, and translate content in parallel with the development cycle. The quality of machine translations exceeded expectations and led to the quick addition of nine languages to their platform. Confim’s future in localization remains bright, guided by a clear ROI from multilingual expansion.
Localization was always in the people platform’s future
With Confirm, It was never a question of whether they should localize or not, but more about how they could localize most efficiently.
“I think localization is one of the first things that you should think about because it's easy for us to forget that the world does not speak only English.” – David Murray, CEO at Confirm
Three reasons for Confirm to localize their performance management platform:
- Clear sales opportunities from the start: non-native speakers were using Confirm from the very beginning.
- Supports their business philosophy: Confirm wanted to make it just as easy for non-native English speakers to navigate their platform, to create a fair environment for everyone. “It was important from an equity standpoint.”
- Priority for their customers: multinational clients have offices where English is not their primary language and were asking for the platform in other languages.
Technical requirements for dev-friendly localization
With a technical localization background, David knew this would be a huge project, and was looking for features that would make the process easier for the dev team.
- Were there SDKs?
- Was the API documentation good?
- Was there GitHub code his team could use?
He also had an idea of how he wanted localization workflows to work for his dev team:
“A tool that magically pulls out the strings when code gets into GitHub and magically translates them, then magically puts them back in.”
Lokalise ticked all the boxes and the team was able to get localization up and running in three days. “It went incredibly fast”, said David.
Efficient workflows, automatic translations, and zero complaints
The team was developing new features and wanted to release everything all at once so they’d only need to maintain one version of the software.
That meant getting features translated quickly.
With Lokalise, the team has been able to set up efficient workflows so developers can build features and get them translated at the same time. By default, they start with automatic translations and then replace them with human ones if needed.
“The big thing for us has been in the workflows. New features just go from string to automatic translation, followed by manual translation. So we always have automatic translations kind of as a stop-gap”
Having automatic translations as a stop-gap for a few days has been a worthwhile trade-off for David and his team.
“If we have to go live with the feature really quick, it's way better to have translated strings than blank strings or having to delay a feature.”
The key metric they focus on to determine the success of translations is the number of complaints they receive in another language, as well as layout issues or bugs related to translations. So far, the number of complaints has been zero.
“What comes from Lokalise AI is really high quality. So that's been great. The quality of the automatic translations significantly exceeded my expectations. We haven't received a single complaint concerning anything related to the localized versions of our software.”
Launching with a new language in just 8 days
The team at Confirm is now localizing their platform in nine other languages: Spanish, French, Canadian French, German, Italian, simplified Chinese, traditional Chinese, Greek, and Japanese
“To add a new language was mind-blowingly easy. It was like eight days end to end, from introducing the new language getting the strings translated, going through QA and then live.”
The team even uses this as a selling point to convert prospects.
“When talking with clients who are considering another language, we tell them in our sales process, If you sign with us and you go live within a couple of weeks we will have the languages that you need by the time you go live because we know that we can do it just in time,” said David.
Seamless collaboration for quality localization at speed
It’s now easier for the engineering and QA teams to work together on localization without any bottlenecks, making sure that strings are in separate files and everything is localized.
With automations between GitHub and Lokalise, strings are automatically extracted and translated then sent to a language provider to review them. Once they’re ready, the reviewed translations automatically come back into Confirm’s system.
"The process is seamless and smooth. It's that perfect balance of moving as fast as you can but maintaining quality while not significantly slowing things down."
The future of localization at Confirm
Confirm will continue to localize their platform as long as they see an ROI from localization.
“If the the number of clients that need the platform in another language is greater than the cost and the time and the energy to localize, we will always keep localizing. And there's no question that the answer to that question is yes,” said David.
Localization made easy.
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