A Letter to Santa from Transifex Native

At the beginning of this year, a new technology, called Transifex Native, began to develop and take its first steps. Later, in May, the Transifex application adopted this baby and started to guide it to its first steps. As we addressed early mishaps and kept on nurturing Transifex Native, it grew to become a child and a teenager with its own radical ideas. We started introducing it to more customers and adding new “toys” to play with (check our Amazon Translate and Figma posts on working over Transifex Native). Today, Transifex Native is a formed individual with ideas and workflows of its own (check out automated workflows using Native and the option to use Native from the Transifex interface).

Although Transifex Native has matured a lot just during this year, its capabilities and features are still only in their early stages. Following the analogy that this technology is a child, let’s see what new features Transifex Native would request from Santa for the future.

“Dear Santa, my name is Transifex Native and I’ve been a good child this last year. As my parents and friends do love and care for my future, I would like to go a little crazy and ask you for some wild things for the future…”

Future features in the sock above the fireplace

In this wishlist, we have included features that are placed way further down our roadmap, or are just crazy ideas right now! To reach these ideas and goals, we have excluded the features that are already included in our short-term roadmap, and have included ideas from our internal team and our existing Transifex Native customers.

Each feature has a fairly small explanation of what it is and what value it offers.

1. Transifex Native Analytics

Expanding Transifex Native SDK to gather analytics and behavioral usage from clients to create amazing dashboards similar to Google Analytics. This way localization managers can prioritize and make good decisions on popular content, languages, behaviors, conventions, etc. At the same time, the return of investment on localization will be clearly visible!

2. In-context Translation

Offering the ability to translate in context on mobile and website applications without the need to push screenshots. If screenshots are required, then uploading and assigning coordinates for text content should be automatically generated.

In-context through screenshots is currently available in Transifex and there is also an API available to do that programmatically.

3. Live-push

When the feature runs on a specific environment, for example, a development environment or an admin environment, the Native ‘t’ function actually pushes source strings to Transifex, if they are not already in the cache. This will help with capturing dynamic content that is rendered only when an application is running. Some examples of this are:

• Names or static content responses, like language or area names following a specific preset format.
• Variables that hold content for translation, which again render only when the application runs.
• Handling localization for newly added content as it happens! For example, by adding a new product along with its description in an e-shop’s admin interface your developers can use Live-Push to send this content for translation as it happens.

4. Code Editor Plugins

Having a plugin for an IDE of choice can make a big difference for a developer. A Transifex Native plugin could help by providing:

• Key suggestions when typing new content that needs translation, so that no duplicate strings are introduced
• Localized content preview for any Transifex Native keys added in the code, for a quick preview and faster QA on the spot, Why wait for the application to run to identify that you don’t have enough screen space for the content in German?
• Issue and Comments interaction for all Transifex Native content identified in a code file. This way the developer can communicate with the localization team directly from the IDE of choice on identified issues with localized versions or reply to a localization member’s question on the spot.

5. Transifex Native-enabled Third-Party Integrations

Integrate Transifex Native with existing services to localize content coming from Help Centers, Design tools, CMSs, or even legacy code. This way you will bypass all the existing issues over duplicate content management coming from how each tool handles content and be able to connect multiple applications under a single project for your localization. Additionally, using the over the air delivery that Transifex Native offers, any updates on localized content will be almost instant for chunks smaller than how each service defines content right now. For example, a Help Center article is considered a single content resource that needs to be updated as a whole while using Transifex Native each phrase will be updated on its own.

6. Content Delivery Service API

Extending the Content Delivery Service to have its own API will make Transifex Native a standalone service that will not require the Transifex application to run. This way you will be able to set up a localization workflow using a different Translation Management System or talk directly with a translation vendor to complete the translation work. With this API in place, you will get:

• Transifex Native SDK across different frameworks/languages, which will be sharing the same syntax to describe localization content (ICU) and will connect to a single service to get translations from, the Content Delivery Service
• The Transifex Native Content Delivery Service, which will hold all your global content, with the added option to interact through the API with any service of choice to get translated content and send content for translation.

Here are some cookies and milk

I hope you will find this wishlist interesting and drop us a message about your favorite feature of Transifex Native. We would be happy to talk more about the future of our child, Transifex Native.

In the meantime, we are working on releasing Transifex Native SDKs for mobiles, iOS-swift for Apple phones, and Java-Android for Android phones. All our work is open-source so feel free to share a star, an issue, or comment in the respecting repositories (Javascript/React Native SDK, Python/Django Native SDK, Content Delivery Service, Native SDK specifications).

Wishing that 2021 will bring some good news for our world and for every person individually! May our wishes come true!