"Before Lokalise, I’m not sure translations were done very well or competently at all. The idea of making the best use of resources is really important, so getting a third party to help with this was a bit of a no-brainer."
Founded in 2004, Orbus has spent the last 15 years helping enterprise companies (like IKEA and BP) with their digital journey to the cloud. Today, they work with more than 550 businesses and 60,000 end users in 48 countries.
Orbus works closely with Lokalise and Milengo to localize its web app in multiple languages. Milengo is a certified language services provider with more than three decades of industry experience.
We sat down with Orbus’ technical writer, who also oversees localization work, Vladyslav Remnov, and product director Jonathan Dean to explore how they use Lokalise and Milengo to deliver higher quality localized products faster.
Orbus works with such a huge range of organizations and regions that a one-size-fits-all approach is out of the question.
Its customers span from blue chip enterprises to large government departments across all industry verticals, from financial services to healthcare. Each of these has their own unique requirements, markets, and customer bases, meaning Orbus needed to offer them the best possible localization from the get-go.
Prior to working with Lokalise, Orbus translated its on-premises products in-house. In fact, Vladyslav himself oversaw much of the localization work and project management but quickly realized they needed the right tools and partners to scale this sustainably.
“Before Lokalise, I’m not sure translations were done very well or competently at all,” explains Jonathan. “The idea of making the best use of resources is really important, and this is no different for us than it is for larger organizations. We wanted to make sure that people with expertise can actually contribute, so from our point of view, getting a third party to help with this was a bit of a no-brainer.”
When it comes to shipping localized products fast, the debate often focuses on speed versus quality. But what if you have neither speed or quality?
Prior to Lokalise, Orbus didn’t have a localization workflow. They worked directly with a language vendor to translate user guides to Russian and French. “It was awful,” says Vladyslav. He adds: “quality was so poor that we needed a new solution ASAP.”
Aside from issues with translation quality, Vladyslav was struggling with versioning. “One of the biggest challenges in localization is versioning. The quality of the global content cannot be assured without everyone looking at the same source,” he says. Even once things are in translation, the English source will often still change.
With Lokalise, Orbus now has a single shared workspace that allows them to improve translation output, and manage updates more easily.
Now, Orbus deploys Lokalise and Milengo to localize its knowledge base in a web app. In practice, this means translating 16 technical and administrator guides into four languages (French, German, Spanish, and Portuguese) using the Lokalise platform.
How this works is much more streamlined than before. Orbus’ team creates a new project in the Lokalise platform, where legacy documentation can be uploaded and automatically pre-translated using machine translation. Then, Orbus can work with Milengo translators in Lokalise to ensure accurate translations are pushed to the QA team for deployment.
Vladyslav explains that this one-stop approach has drastically helped support the productivity of both himself and his team. “If we didn’t use Lokalise, it would take much longer for me to send those files and folders back and forth, it's much faster now,” he says.
Where some enterprises are forced to work with separate translation and localization vendors, the partnership between Lokalise and Milengo means Orbus is able to quickly deliver on their localization strategy.
Milengo first partnered with Lokalise in December 2020, and have played a pivotal role in the value we deliver for customers such as Volkswagen Group, Vacation Renter, and many more. Some of the most successful Lokalise customers use our TMS as a centralized solution for collaboration between in-house stakeholders and outsourced language partners.
Lokalise introduced Milengo to Orbus on account of the low-quality translations that previous vendors were providing. This was due to the high level of technical terminology required by Orbus, and the need for target-native translators who could work accurately with Orbus’ glossary.
As a result, Jonathan says that the partnership enabled Orbus to “respond to opportunities quickly” thanks to the usability of Lokalise and the rapid delivery of translations by Milengo, who have delivered all translation tasks ahead of time.
Outlining this process, Vladyslav says: “I get a request from our CTO that we need localization for a new web app. I send an email to Milengo asking for a quote, and within a few hours, they come back to me. Once our CTO approves the quote, Milengo shares how much time they’ll need to complete the task and the work begins. There’s always a quick response and it’s always done on time.” In a bid to step up their localization game, Orbus has also appointed a new member of the product team dedicated to managing the process, giving Vladyslav more time to focus on his responsibilities as a technical writer.
What’s more, the Lokalise platform made it much easier for Orbus to make minor changes to translations thanks to its machine learning tools, which provide automatic updates.
Vladyslav says that, coupled with version control, Orbus are able to identify source changes and quickly alter translations from end to end. All this is aided by integrations with Figma, which means the translation process can sit alongside changes to the Orbus web app, as well as the ability to switch to file-based imports for legacy content under time pressure.
Once Orbus’ technical and administrative guides are fully translated, Vladyslav, Jonathan, and the team want to focus their future efforts on translating their existing knowledge base and eventually localize their entire user interface.
“As we gain more traction in certain countries, then that will become more important,” explains Jonathan. “It’s always quite interesting when you talk about a product like this in the enterprise space, because language translation is perhaps less of a priority than it would be for a B2C type of product.”
“But actually, there are significant advantages to having localized languages in enterprise markets, so for us, translation remains a priority as we enter different regions.”
Delivering scalable, native-level localization isn’t easy, but working with Lokalise is. If you’re a language service provider looking to elevate your localization expertise, get in touch with us for a no-strings conversation about how we can uncover new opportunities together.
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