Localazy

AI is empowering, but it can have a negative impact on cognitive load. As a developer, before AI maybe I’d spend 20% of my time designing the solution and making the difficult decisions. Then 80% of the time I’d write code. Now, that’s basically reversed. You design the solution, ask AI to implement it, and while it’s working you naturally open another window or branch and start doing the same for another problem. And by the time you finish the third idea (cognitive work), AI has finished writing code and now you need to check it or give instructions. So, you run in circles across several discussions. Instead of 20% cognitive work and 80% lighter, more relaxing work, it can become something like 90% cognitive work. Output-wise, you’re growing. But it can also be really exhausting. https://lnkd.in/eXyhHtPq

Is localization solved once and for good now that we have AI? Six years in this industry has taught me that the question is not "is it solved?" but is "for whom is it solved?" If someone already wants to understand, a bad translation still gets the message across. Google Translate proved that years ago. If someone needs to decide about buying something pricey, the bar is different. No one buys from a shopping cart they cannot find when it is mistranslated. I asked AI a question in Czech today. It answered with confidence and used two words that do not exist in the language. A dictionary would reject both. I ignored them. I want to understand the main point so a made up word does not stop me. A customer deciding whether to buy from you will not be as patient or unaffected by the bad signal of quality this gives. AI narrowed the gap between machine and human translation. It did not close it. (Or at least not yet.) The quality is better. The trust in it is higher too. But there is still a gap. Here's an example of a confusing MT translation, translating "backend server" as "waitress". 😀

My love has got no money, he’s got a strongbolies. My Love has no power, he’s got a stronbolies! Or stronbolies. Tronbonies? When did you realise he has a strong beliefs? 💁♀️🤣 Well, anyway, let’s get to the point 😃 I don’t know if I can speak for all non-English millennials who were never into music and lyrics and just went with the flow…🤙 But I can’t just go and sing karaoke. Among all the reasons (the main one being that I actually can’t sing), I grew up with what today would be called “just vibing with the song” rather than “knowing it word for word.” When I talked to my dear friends for whom English is their second or even a third language, we sort of agreed that we could never separate the words in songs. We just made up our own. You go with the sound of it over the sense of it. 😃 A friend I met while travelling told me he learned English by its sound, by how the words felt and what he imagined they meant, rather than by drilling them on paper. For me too, associating words with something is the easiest way to learn another language. And to be fair, when we get to Asian languages, so much depends on melody and tone. Sometimes it’s impossible to even catch it. I’m sure plenty of you have seen videos about phở, the most famous soup from Vietnam. Say phò instead of phở and you may be asking for an adult companion (LinkedIn, please don’t ban me 🙏 ) instead of a delicious bowl of beef broth. Somehow I landed family size one on my travels 🤣 What’s your favourite made-up lyric? 🎤 And next time you sing karaoke with your new friend from a non-English-speaking country, don’t forget: just choose something easy 😃 Something like…. It’s Britney, B*tch! 😎 By Eli, with Localazy

For a few years, I was the developer of Floating Apps and the person running all of its translations. That meant files, orders for professional translators, a community of contributors and a lot of checks. All of it landed on my plate alongside the programming work. I'd finish a feature and then "switch jobs". I'd roll up my sleeves and go through the translations. "Who changed what?", "Which languages are done?", "Do I need to place another order?". Every hour I spent on the management of translations was an hour I didn't spend working the app. ☹️ I get flashbacks of those days when I talk to developers who are struggling with their product's localization. When someone tells me they can't release until translations are finished, or they can't see what changed, I know exactly how that feels. That was me. I still code. Floating Apps has been localized on Localazy since 2020 and now has 35 languages. But my old collection of translation comparison tools and the manual translation management process is gone. 😄 I built Localazy to get that time back for myself. Now I'd love for it to do the same for every team using it. My team put together some of my notes about how it all happened. You can read it all below. (And here is a picture from the early days. A part of the the current Localazy team with Jiří Hlavenka, one of our first investors. 🙂 )

For Directus users of our plugin, translations can now come back from Localazy automatically. When translations are published in Localazy, a webhook calls your Directus instance and the plugin imports them. Nobody has to click Import. 🧑💻 Letting an automation write into your CMS unattended can feel uncomfortable, though. You want to know what changed and who changed it. So the automated import runs as a Directus admin user you pick on the Automation page. Every webhook-driven write is attributed to that user. The trade-off is that this user needs the Admin role with full schema access. If you prefer to keep it separate, you can create a dedicated admin user only for the plugin. 🙂 The whole setup for this automation is done in three steps as you can see below.

We've the past few months moving Localazy from a translation-only product toward something closer to full service. The goal, as always, is to help our users localize faster without having to cut corners on quality. I've touched on this briefly in this article but we'll have more updates for you soon. 🙂