Internationalization and Localization in Transferwise

1. I18n & L10n in TW
Maksym Bryzhko
Software Engineer at Transferwise
maksym@transferwise.com

2. Internationalization vs. Localization

3. Localization
Localization = L10n
Adaptation of a product, application or document
content to meet the language, cultural and other
requirements of a specific target market (a locale)

4. Internationalization
Internationalization = I18n
Designing and building an application to facilitate
localization. The main concern is that application
can be adapted to various languages and regions
without engineering changes.

5. Why localization in needed in
Transferwise?

6. 30% of our customers prefer a non-English
language

7. Localized product increase MNU and conversion.
* MNU - Monthly New User

8. Qualitatively, our customers are asking for it.

9. Language Launch Prioritization
Criteria:
● Current demand - existing customers' browser language
● Growth - browser language growth over past 4 months
● Opportunity - Migrant market size and English proficiency
● Profitability - Route sustainability
Also taken into account:
● How easy to translate
● Availability of translators
● TransferWise priorities

10. How did we started?

11. External Translators
Helped to translate part of the home page.
Problems:
● Low quality
● Lack of Context
● Terms

12. Our internal Customer Support
● Multilingual CS team of ~250 members and 46 nationalities
● Devs asked translations for DE and ES via slack
Limitation:
● Cannot be scaled for many languages

13. Translation Services
etc...

14. Managing Translations

15. Managing Translations

16. Convenient tooling for making translations

17. In-Сontext Tool

18. Integration
CLI (Command Line Interface) - allows to upload/download translations from the
project working copy
Rest API - Useful for custom workflows

19. Context
Terms
Translation Memory

20. Translation Process
1)Source (English) messages are pushed to the
repo
2)The messages are uploaded to the Crowdin
3)Pre-translation from Translation Memory(TM)
is applied
4)Translators and Proofreaders complete the
translation
5)The translations are downloaded from the
Crowdin and pushed into the repo

21. Crowdsourcing (our next goal)
1)Initiation of external translators
2)Voting mechanism

22. Q & A