Customizing Localization with Software Integrations in Phrase
While achieving global user adoption of your digital product might seem like a daunting challenge, your experience dictates that it’s certainly achievable with the right tools and strategies, like software integrations within your localization platform. Let’s explore how Phrase can make your localization workflow more efficient through integrations in the following areas:
- File sharing and management
- Source code repositories
- Programming languages
- APIs and SDKs
- Translation management
- Content management
Why Software Integrations Matter for Localization
You know that delivering results to your users fast and in their native language (especially when 9 out of 10 people ignore a product if it’s not in their language) is the key to success, and you are confident that a robust software localization tool will help lead the way.
However, if your company is fairly new to managing full-scale localization projects, or you’re doubting that you’re getting the best results out of your current software, you might be unsure about what actually makes a localization tool robust. If that’s the case, and you are evaluating potential software options, there’s one key question you should ask yourself:
Does your software allow the integration with your existing systems, tools, and services so that all localization stakeholders can collaborate from inside a single platform?
If it doesn’t, then you have the wrong tool in your hands. You want a software localization platform that supports a wealth of different file formats and programming languages. Your system should allow content, design, localization, and development to combine efforts from within a single space — teamwork makes the dream work, they say.
With Phrase, you can customize and streamline your workflow from the very start. Our dozens of integration options can automate all your current manual interactions between product development and localization functions. Your team can choose the integrations they prefer among the following ones:
File Uploads
As with all web-based translation management systems, Phrase allows starting your localization workflow by uploading your existing localization files. To begin effortlessly managing the process, you simply need to import your content into your Phrase localization project after ensuring that your files are correctly formatted.
You can upload your files in the Translation Center, via the API, or via our command-line client. Select them in the file browser or drag and drop them from your desktop — Phrase supports XLIFF, Excel, CSV, JSON, and many other formats.
Phrase will process your file in the background during a file upload so you can navigate to other pages if you need it. During processing, Phrase will extract the translation data and import it into your project. Once that’s done, you may start working on the actual translation immediately.
Phrase CLI Tool
The Translation Center is not the only way to manage your project files; you can also use Phrase’s CLI tool. The CLI Tool is available for Linux, macOS, and Windows and lets you access all API endpoints. Upload and download locale files between Phrase and your source code from a command-line interface to avoid long curl requests.
Directly from within your individual IDE, the Phrase CLI tool allows you to quickly sort out one-off translation projects, giving you complete control over the process.
Connectors/Adapters
If your developers regularly create files of similar formats, you can use a Phrase connector or adapter to automatically process them and sync them up with their translations. After all, developers should focus on developing new features, not on manually uploading and downloading files from their source code repositories.
Phrase’s connector integration constantly updates newly translated content in the source code and is available, for example, for GitHub, Bitbucket, and GitLab sync. Through this integration, localization managers can request their developers to release new translations with a single click while, at the same time, reducing the overhead for developers of adding new keys manually to Phrase.
Developers can then import translations back to GitHub as a pull request and merge them seamlessly into the source code.
Language Libraries
Adding to our fantastic ecosystem of developer resources, our helper code libraries help expand the Phrase API into specific languages. Whichever your developers’ preferred language, they can use our libraries for native function calls to access Phrase programmatically within their own applications.
Among the programming languages supported by our code libraries, you will find the top 5 languages used on GitHub and some other popular ones: Java, JavaScript, Kotlin, PHP, Python, and Ruby.
SDKs
When your company works with agile development and agile localization, waiting for fully localized versions of your product before releasing them to the App Store or Google Play should be a thing of the past. Through its Software Development Kits, Phrase lets you update translations for your iOS and Android applications with a single click. With its Over-the-Air (OTA) SDKs, available for iOS and Android, the stores instantly pull translations from Phrase.
This OTA functionality allows you to localize your product with on-the-fly translations, which is especially useful when your app is highly interactive or needs frequent updates. To get started, you simply create your first distribution (typically one per project), within which you can define the target platforms (i.e., iOS or Android).
Plugins for Designers
Bridging a company’s preferred design tool, such as Sketch or Figma, with their software localization platform doesn’t have to entail designers looking at code, nor a manual workflow that takes time and costs you money.
Without proper integration between design and localization, designers need to wait until the testing phase to spot design issues such as text length. Instead, you want them to be able to push the keys, the content strings, and the contextual screenshots in one go and then pull back the localized copy to create localized designs ahead of testing.
Phrase’s design plugins allow content to be grabbed directly from the Sketch or Figma file. If your designers work in Android Studio or Microsoft Visual Studio, Phrase has a plugin for them as well.
Webhooks
A webhook is a feature for sending notifications to external services, like chat clients, project management tools, and other external APIs of actions taken in Phrase.
Send status updates to other tools, like your Slack channel: Phrase will insert your messages for you. You can also set a URL for Phrase to call whenever a certain event takes place.
Some of the events for which you can create webhooks include:
- A new language version was created/changed/renamed/reconfigured/deleted in a project,
- A locale file was uploaded/processed,
- A key was created/renamed/changed/deleted,
- A translation of a key in a certain language version was added/edited/delivered/reviewed,
- A comment on a translation key was added,
- A job was started/reopened/marked as complete,
- A screenshot was added/changed/rename/deleted, etc.
API
Phrase offers a comprehensive and well-documented REST API (take a look at Phrase’s API DNA if you’d like to understand the logic behind it in more detail) for you to build your own integration.
Our powerful API allows you to import and export locale files, tag keys, and interact in a dozen other ways with the localization data that Phrase stores in your account. These are its key service endpoints:
- Projects: View, create, or delete projects (each of them with its own resources, team members, jobs, etc.).
- Locales: List, view, create, or delete languages (called ‘locales’ in the context of internationalization) within each project. Each project needs one default locale, which defines the user’s language and includes language-specific parameters such as verb inflection rules, plural rules, etc.
- Keys: You can list, view, create, or delete unique segment IDs, called ‘keys,’ per project.
- Translations: You can list, view, create, or delete different translations per project, each of them associated with one or more keys.
- Uploads: You can import files both manually and automatically and track their status.
- Tags: You can manage tag metadata for each key to simplify and expedite control and search.
- Blacklisting: You can blacklist or filter out particular keys within a project.
- Versions: You can see all revisions of each translation.
- Apart from these core functions, there are additional aspects such as Jobs, Branches, Comments, Integrations, User Management, and Glossaries.
Software Integrations for Translation
Sometimes, you have everything you need to kickstart your localization process, but you are missing a key component: the human factor. With Phrase, hiring translators, editors, and proofreaders doesn’t depend on dozens of ‘Translators needed ASAP’ posts online. We connect you with professional translators in just a few clicks!
One of our most praised software integrations is our LSP integration: you can order professional translations from our vendor partners Gengo and TextMaster without leaving Phrase.
Once you’ve put together your translation dream team, you can ensure they translate with maximum content with our In-Context Editor, one of the most powerful and useful tools that Phrase offers. With the ICE, your translators can see in real-time how translations would appear on your website. They can also edit and add translations to the online environment in a few simple steps, thus greatly streamlining your localization.
Content Management Integrations
With Phrase, you can translate your content in multiple languages by setting up direct sync between Phrase and CMS platforms like WordPress and Contentful.
WordPress
WordPress is the king of content management, with its architecture, user-friendly interface, and a massive range of plugins and themes contributing to its global success:
- 62% of websites built on a Content Management System (CMS) ARE WordPress sites;
- WordPress is used in over 178 countries;
- 313,050 of the top 1 million websites are based on WordPress;
- WordPress is available in 100 languages, mainly through multilingual plug-ins, although its translation quality assurance is deficient.
When you consider the above, it was only logical that Phrase would find a way to provide all the missing functionalities through its easy-to-set-up WordPress integration. Save yourself the effort and stress of manually sending files back and forth and the hassle of individually supervising the progress of each translator in your team. Instead, send and assign projects to them directly from Phrase. This tutorial brings together everything you need to know about localizing with the Phrase WordPress translation plugin.
Contentful
Contentful is a trusted, API-first content management system that allows users to create, manage, and publish content on any digital channel through powerful cloud features such as managed hosting, REST and GraphQL API access, and an incalculable amount of first-party SDKs.
Phrase’s Contentful integration allows developers, writers, managers, and marketers to connect to their Phrase account and access Phrase translations directly from Contentful. For further information, have a look at our guide to headless CMS localization with Phrase and Contentful.
Localization gets you ahead of the game — Phrase keeps you there
By localizing your software, you are on track to making a global impact. However, coordinating suppliers, managing budgets and expectations, seeing to the efficiency of various workflows, and improving the way your teams work together requires great effort.
Each team contributes to the project as a whole in its own unique way — but their synergy can propel your business forward in ways you never thought possible. Cross-collaboration, of course, depends largely on your team finding your tools easy and convenient to use.
With Phrase’s massive spectrum of software integrations, your teams can thus choose what suits them best. Complete with step-by-step guides and support staff that are eager to help, our integrations allow you to customize and streamline your workflow like never before.
Sign up for a free 14-day trial with Phrase today! And if you can’t find the integration you are looking for, let us know right away. The Phrase Team is always adding more.
Originally published on The Phrase Blog.
