Cutting-edge digital solutions without borders

Supercharge is an international digital agency working with clients from around the globe to create transformative digital solutions. In order to lay down next-generation digital strategies, design delightful interfaces, and build robust software for products fit for the future, they seek out the most cutting-edge technology and design solutions available on the market.

Their team of over 150 digital experts located in London, Amsterdam, and Budapest works daily with international clients with various localization needs. The importance of timing is often crucial to their projects, and they’re always seeking to make their processes faster and more seamless. For them, the right localization tool is essential both for enhancing internal cooperation and speeding up implementation.

Bulletproof digital products in the making

Creating digital products is a complex, multi-step process that often hinges on well-oiled collaboration between several divisions. Supercharge’s product team establishes the product strategy, builds up the product design, and creates user interfaces which then serve as a starting point for their development team.

The order of these steps, however, is frequently jumbled up. Any product copy is liable to last-minute changes and UI design can affect the length of the text, not to mention the case when the whole question of localization comes up at a later release, forcing the design team to rethink their UIs to accommodate the needs of another language. However, the usual ping-pong of such a product development process is a lot easier to follow when teams are using a localization tool that allows for dynamic content changes – especially if it offers a Figma integration (more on that later!).

Defining these issues (and the ways to solve them) helped Supercharge pin down the exact localization software they wanted to try: Lokalise became their tool of choice. 

Besides offering a very straightforward and user-friendly platform, they found that Lokalise was the easiest tool to adapt to any of their multifaceted development scenarios, and that it fit seamlessly into their way of working. It didn’t happen from one second to the next: their adoption was gradual. They experimented, kept learning, and came to rely on the Lokalise tool in more and more ways every day.

The beginning

Supercharge’s journey with Lokalise began back in 2019, when they first started using it as a release-only tool. They chose this option partly because of the nature of a particular project: they were working on an app, where copy updates happened on the fly and there was no reliable release schedule to count on. 

Lokalise was pretty effective straight away. Developers simply uploaded the copy, then translators did their magic, and the translations went live with the next release. They also loved the tool’s look and feel; the UI was very pleasant and intuitive. Still, at that time they were unaware of the bigger things that would come along the way.

Experimenting with the SDK

To comply with their client’s request for real-time resource updates (and also because of certain industry changes) they introduced the Lokalise SDK into their pipeline. The integration was quick and easy: they got things up and running in a couple of hours. The product’s nature required the copy to be constantly changed – not necessarily in line with product releases – and by implementing the SDK, their partner was able to change the text in real time.

The Figma-shaped cherry on top

Finally, the time came to unleash Lokalise's true superpower: the Figma integration. They had their doubts about how effectively the integration would exchange design content, translations and screenshots between Figma and Lokalise, but it worked seamlessly. There was no time wasted on trial and error as the solution came with a recommended workflow that was simple and quick to adopt.

Their designers enjoyed the multiple benefits the integration has brought into their daily work: creating an instant link between design and copy made it easy to test their UI in multiple languages when translations were ready. Lokalise also offers automatic (AI-driven) translations until the final version is available. The tool has considerably shortened the time necessary to identify copy issues, especially through the option of attaching screenshots to copy keys. This latter feature delights not only designers, but developers and translators as well, since referring to and finding the right text usually takes up a large amount of time in a localization process.

Their developer team is also grateful for the automatically generated keys, which now substitute their manual uploads, while translators can work more comfortably knowing that there is auto-translated copy to fall back on.