Localization is more than just translating your website, app, product copy, software, or any other type of digital product. It’s about carefully designing your strategy for entering new markets while bearing in mind the cultural nuances, specific customer behaviors, and of course – the language. Make no mistake, it’s not the end result, but the process of adapting your all the time evolving copy, product, and services for international markets, and thus is never ending and continuous.
Localization can often go sideways. When done wrong, it can lead to flattening the company’s growth curve, missed revenue opportunities, and disengaging customers in foreign markets. However, having the right tool to empower localization is helpful.
SourceForge recently caught up with Aleksandrs Pereverzevs, Product Lead at Lokalise, to talk about the hypergrowth of the company, what makes Lokalise different from other solutions on the market, and where the localization software industry is heading.
1. Lokalise was first bootstrapped and then you decided to raise external capital to hire top SaaS talent globally and accelerate growth. You managed to raise $6M from a group of reputable VC and angel investors. Can you tell us a bit more about the history of Lokalise and how it became what it is today?
Alex: Lokalise was initially a homegrown internal tool that helped Nick & Petr to localize strings for their mobile product, Roamer. Next, fellow startup people asked to try it out as they faced similar localization challenges. Later, friends of friends were already prepared to pay for some improvements. At one point, it became apparent that Lokalise is a product that has much more potential than Roamer and they decided to switch their focus to Lokalise.
2. What is Lokalise and what problems does it solve?
Alex: Lokalise is a rapidly growing translation management system (TMS) with an innovative UI/UX, strong automation capabilities, and the most recognized support in the market. Lokalise is a great tool for agile teams seeking to establish the continuous localization process for their software products by integrating it into their CI/CD process, as well as to have a single source of truth for their corporate translations. Besides that, Lokalise is a true multiplatform software that allows larger teams to translate all digital assets, including marketing content, documents, games, mobile apps, etc.
3. What makes Lokalise different from other similar solutions on the market?
Alex: The architecture of Lokalise is completely different to that of most other solutions. It was not built with just being able to upload files for translation in mind. Instead, it was a collaborative tool from the very beginning. It’s also newer than its competition, which means that the technologies used are more modern and, therefore, more scalable.
For example, a lot of the competitive solutions do not even allow you to change the source language without re-uploading the file, while it’s a no-brainer in Lokalise. It’s a small thing, but it makes a huge difference when you need to do the work fast. As a matter of fact, the number of features, big and small, which just make more sense than those on the market, is almost endless.
4. Lokalise has recently been certified according to ISO/IEC 27001 and ISO/IEC 27017. Can you tell us more about what this means, security-wise?
Alex: This means that Lokalise checks all the security boxes and places us on the map to compete for the attention of companies with the highest security standards. Our security practices, data safeguards, and risk management processes comply with industry best practices.
5. Lokalise was created by developers, for developers. Still, this is not the only customer group that benefits from using the software. Can you tell us more about Lokalise as a collaborative platform and the key roles that use it?
Alex: Lokalise was built to unlock the collaborative nature of the localization process, which was historically very fragmented. We target 3 main groups: developers, managers, and translators. These groups have various roles underneath them, though. Each of these groups create value from Lokalise in very different ways: a) developers seek to automate routine processes and integrate localization into CI/CD pipelines; b) managers distribute and manage the work; c) translators are logically concerned with the translation itself.
Our software is used by developers, product managers, designers, marketing managers, country managers, localization managers, language service providers (LSPs), translators, UX writers, copywriters, and QA & LQA teams. Some of the abovementioned roles emerge once the company grows, and the beauty of Lokalise is that it caters for both small startups who want to optimize for the speed of delivery and large enterprises who choose control & quality over this speed.
6. Who are some of Lokalise’s current customers?
Alex: Lokalise is used by almost 2,000 customers from 80 countries. They include Revolut, Tidal, Yelp, ESL, BASF, Back Market, Mindvalley, and others, from startups and SMEs to Fortune 500 companies.
7. Lokalise customers report a 37% shorter development release cycle and 8x faster translation delivery. What are some of the key features that enable such great results?
Alex: 1) Integrations with developer tools, e.g. GIT repositories (GitHub, Bitbucket, GitLab, etc.), powerful API, webhooks & event-based integrations. 2) A collaborative editor where different stakeholders can work with each other in real-time. 3) Small productivity features that make routine tasks a breeze (e.g. bulk actions, duplicate finder, automations, and so on).
8. What are the things your customers love the most about Lokalise?
Alex: I would highlight the modern UI/UX, great customer support, strong API and SDKs, and numerous advanced ready-made integrations. Customers are generally much more satisfied with Lokalise, starting with lightning speed onboarding, and further to employing more advanced features across the customer journey.
Most TMS & CAT tools look like Excel on steroids, while Lokalise provides a completely innovative experience that is similar to modern B2B SaaS tools found in other lines of work. Even customers who used other TMS/CAT tools before (some of them did), appreciate that Lokalise is extremely intuitive. Our support is by far the best rated on G2, all team members, including top management, join in on customer conversations in our in-app support chat now and then. This fact sets the tone for everything else — customer first. The strong API and SDKs allow users to seamlessly integrate Lokalise with any system out there.
9. How do you see the localization software industry moving forward?
Alex: I anticipate that more & more services will be replaced by effective tooling. This does not mean that human intervention will be completely replaced by machines, absolutely not. It will change the human role in the process, though, and will allow people to leverage tools while focusing on higher-value tasks that are more strategic. A good example of this is MT, where post-editing becomes more and more appealing. However, I am a firm believer that there are a lot more technological advances coming than just MT.
Another trend is that customers will finally become sole owners of all their translated content and will benefit from tools that are able to act as a single source of truth for their translations.
10. What are your future plans for Lokalise? What’s currently on the roadmap?
Alex: Our roadmap is full of planned features, as well as a number of more fundamental initiatives. First of all, we want to expand horizontally and provide more out-of-the-box options to connect to different systems, where our customers store the content, and get it into Lokalise in a matter of a few clicks.
We also understand the importance of LSPs and translators, who might still be used to other more traditional or old-fashioned tools. Our aim is to change this paradigm and provide more features that would ensure that companies who are our customers can effortlessly manage the process. Quality translations, for a company with enough challenges such as promoting and selling their products and services in international markets, should be easily available. This being regardless of whether a company is using their in-house contributors, freelancers, community, one LSP, or several LSPs simultaneously.
Lastly, we plan to make localization easier for companies who are not quite there yet. It will definitely be a more challenging, but simultaneously more fascinating, set of features.
About Lokalise
Lokalise is the fastest-growing language-tech B2B SaaS company. As a collaborative localization platform, it can help structure, automate, and streamline the translation and localization process for any company in the world. As a result, it becomes a company’s single source of truth for translations.
Launched in 2017, it’s currently used by more than 1,600 companies from 80+ countries, including Notion, Lemonade, Bayer, and KPMG, for continuously adding new translations and updating old ones.
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