Announcing General Availability of Transifex Live

Today, Transifex Live moves out of Beta and is open for everyone. The feedback we received from all of our Beta users was instrumental in getting Transifex Live to this point. A big thanks to everyone who gave it a try and provided such valuable feedback.

Transifex has always had a focus on developers and technical teams. We designed the platform to manage localization content and workflow, to provide a robust user experience for small start-up teams, and to be powerful and customizable for larger corporations. It’s a great platform for companies with experienced teams of international developers or localization managers. But the localization process is still hard for smaller companies just getting started with localization or who want to achieve a lot in a short time. The net-net is that localization is hard.

Localization is hard for developers. It’s a bit of an alien process for them because it requires close collaboration with an external agency who, pretty much, 'owns' the global content. Developers typically don’t like someone else to own their content. You lose control over the the user experience which sometimes feels like you’re giving your 'baby' to an external company. Plus, the agency is now involved in your product development and release schedule, so they can possibly impact the speed of your team and even your time-to-market.

Localization is hard for marketers too. Automating workflows is a very detailed and technical job. Marketers tend to be more creative and want to spend less time on these types of details. Plus, they have to fight for IT and developer resources for their localization projects which are never at the top of the list of things to be done next. There always seem to be bigger fires to fight. Preparing content for localization is a boring job and error-prone (you might forget phrases) so it tends to get done last.

Our goal with Transifex Live is to make localization accessible to everyone. A few years ago, we took a step back and thought, what technologies can we leverage to make everything about the localization process an order of magnitude easier? To shrink the time needed to take a website global from months to days?

The problem was the fact that today internationalization and localization are separate, disparate processes. There's a wall between them. This does not allow a seamless experience from content creation to translated content delivery. This is how Translfex Live was born.

Transifex Live addresses this problem head-on with a completely new way of thinking about localization. We designed it to easily integrate into your development process so localization can serve as a strategic investment, rather than an after thought. The new technology stack takes advantage of powerful client-side scripting with JavaScript, allowing developers to have full control over the localized experience of the user. You add a snippet of JavaScript to your code (just like Google Analytics) and it does its thing in the background while you continue to do your thing. Transifex Live collects phrases from live or staging websites so they can be translated, either by freelance translators, an agency or crowdsourced, and then publishes them (via the browser) as visitors hit the site. When someone from Poland visits your site, they dynamically receive Polish content. When you update your content, changes are detected automatically so you never miss a translation.

There’s obviously a lot more to it than that. If you want to learn more check out the Transifex Live documentation. Or view this short video that gives a good overview of how it works.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zj2L3zqSt28

Transifex Live is helping fulfill our vision of making localization really accessible for everyone. Localization is going to be the key to growth for most companies and it needs to be fully integrated into the core business processes. Transifex Live helps make that possible. Companies will be able to deliver localized experiences which will make customers happy. And when customers are happy, everyone is happy.