“Management requested that we add Finish, Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, and Dutch in a single month – and in that month we translated all the software strings which were roughly 50,000 per language plus our legal docs, which was another 50,000 per language. So roughly half a million.”
The Life360 team was tasked with translating five languages in just one month during the holiday season. Localization Manager, Joaquín Muñoz, achieved this through the use of Lokalise AI. His approach involved a preliminary round of AI translations combined with human post-editing, which led to huge cost and time savings of up to 80% – and with the same translation quality at the end.
Life360 is the #1 family locator app, loved by more than 50 million members worldwide. Since its inception in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Life360 has added driving safety, digital safety, and emergency assistance features to its membership offerings.
Can you do five languages in one month during the Christmas holidays?
Joaquín Muñoz, Localization Manager at Life360, would normally have said no to his management team, but he’d just finished testing Lokalise AI, translating content in bulk, and had “surprisingly very accurate results.”
With 25 years of experience in localization and internationalization, first as a translator and linguist, before moving into engineering and QA, Joaquín has extensive industry knowledge
When he joined Life360 via an acquisition of Tile Inc., the Life360 team was already supporting English and 13 other languages, but no one was owning and driving localization.
That’s when Joaquín stepped in. His first goal was to expand localization processes and tools, which meant bringing in a new translation management system (TMS).
When Joaquín and his team were searching for a translation management tool, AI translation wasn’t necessarily on his list of requirements, though it would become critical later on.
What Joaquín was looking for in a TMS:
Last December Joaquín had just finished being part of the beta project for Lokalise AI when he was approached by his management team. They had some extra budget they needed to use before the end of the year.
“They said hey Joaquín, can you do five languages in one month in the holidays? Normally I would say no way, but I just finished this AI beta and I had surprisingly very accurate results. So I said, let's do it.”
They used Lokalise AI to translate four Nordic languages and Dutch in bulk. The software strings were roughly 50,000 words per language plus the legal docs, which were another 50,000 per language. So roughly half a million.
Joaquin was surprised at how fast he got the translations back.
“Normally, the overall process would have taken a minimum of 2 months and up to 3, depending on resources.”
Once they translated all content into five languages, Joaquín and his team had linguists do a post-edit for nuance, fit, and polish on top of the initial AI.
“Of course, I had to train the AI with our glossary and style guide and everything, but it was amazing. We finished and we were able to get to the finish line despite all the holidays.”
Joaquín and his team saw considerable cost and time savings from using AI on their software strings and legal documents which have hundreds of thousands of words.
“Where AI excels is when you have a large volume,” said Joaquín.
The Life360 team was surprised by the accuracy of Lokalise AI, its ability to understand context and switch between an informal and formal tone, something traditional machine translation tools struggle with.
“Often when you use machine translation, translations will often be informal. But in German most software would want a formal translation. So it's very difficult to use that.”
One area where AI excels over machine translation is that it reduces the time needed for post-edits and corrections by linguists. The overall translation process time is reduced by producing a better quality raw translation in the first place, thereby reducing the editing time needed to achieve the desired linguistic quality.
“AI looks at the style guide, understands this has to be formal for German, and makes those contextual and structural changes. So it's much more useful, and incredibly fast.”
Joaquín can’t stress enough the importance of a style guide, whether using AI or human translators (or both), so that everyone's on the same page:
“Having a structured glossary and style guide makes a huge difference because the AI is only as good as you train it, so I worked for quite some time on our glossary and also our style guide to make sure that it was thorough and understandable.”
“It helps translators stay consistent with your terminology, and it’s a living document you continue to update as a company progresses and adds more features.”
“AI is an incredibly powerful tool that can help reduce time and cost, which makes things possible that would not have been possible before.”
Joaquín believes AI will continue being a tool in the same way MT was used before, but even more accurate and more nuanced so that the correction phase is far less than it would be with MT.
Another feature the team tested was Lokalise AI LQA, which they plan to test more in the future.
“The AI evaluation of legacy translation and translation memories was also remarkably good for specific languages”, said Joaquín.
Finally, Joaquín has been thrilled by the timely responses and resolutions he’s received at Lokalise, whether it’s onboarding of team members, advanced training, technical questions, if there’s been a bug, or even when reaching out about a feature request.
“I feel like Lokalise is very attuned to the customer in terms of what our needs are, understanding what those needs are, and then rolling that into the product to better serve us.”
“If we're stuck, we can go by Slack, we can go by email. There's the 24/7 customer support on the website, and so there are multiple areas of getting answers to the questions we have”
Something he says is “just as important as the current offering”.
The team at Life360 is determined to expand their language support and see how AI handles more challenging languages, along the lines of Chinese, Hebrew, or Arabic.
Since Joaquîn and the team were able to translate into five new languages in less time with less impact to budget, he will have extra to spend this year.
"I may well have more for things like LQA, in areas where I didn't have that luxury due to budgetary constraints."
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