This post was originally published on the Slidebean blog.
The power of translating and localizing a website is undeniable. This may be considered as a non-priority especially when trying to be lean about your development, but it needs to be done sooner rather than later.
I spoke to a few startups about their thoughts and success stories regarding localization. Phillipe Casorla, lead iOS developer at Lifesum mentioned how Russia has become one of their most engaged and profitable markets since they started offering an app version in that language.
However, translation services for a page are expensive and not particularly easy to find. I ran a quick search today and found the first few results are $500+ plus for a medium sized website. Furthermore, handling multiple versions of the website in various languages can be very tough.
For the launch of our presentation software, Slidebean, we knew translation was an absolute necessity. While retaining good engagement metrics throughout our 6-month beta, we saw a huge boost of conversions, engagement and growth when we released the Spanish version of the site in March. This was particularly noticeable in Spain and Costa Rica, where we had assumed that an English-only platform was enough.
As any startup, we tried to find the most economical alternative available.
Handling multiple versions of the site with PhraseApp
In our case, adding support for different languages in Slidebean was not a complicated task, technically speaking. Our application is built on top of the rockstar AngularJS framework, so supporting different languages was just a matter of translating a bunch of JSON files.
Maintaining and keeping track of your language keys and texts, however, can become a big hassle very quickly. This is where PhraseApp comes to the rescue. It lets you keep a dictionary of locale strings, along with versioning, collaboration, and a whole set of useful features.
Once you’ve uploaded all your strings, you can simply choose a new language, and start translating them. You can always tell which languages are ready, and which ones have pending translations. Finally, you can export your dictionary in any popular format you wish. In our case, we just exported our files back to JSON files.
PhraseApp also offers their own professional translation service. But at a $0.06 per word rate would have brought our costs to around $300 for all languages. Instead, we turned to Fiverr®.
Fiverr, (almost) anything you want starting at $5
Fiverr, a global online marketplace offering services, called Gig®, at a starting rate of $5. You can get anything from logo and presentation design, to promotional or testimonial videos. I first came across Fiverr a couple years ago and figured I should give it a try since it was only $5 for a translation Gig (rates are typically around 500 words for $5) and it worked marvelously. We had a French version of Slidebean in a couple days. We did the same thing for Portuguese and expect to expand to more languages in the upcoming weeks.
Prior to the launch, we paid a few extra Fiverr Gigs to have someone run through the site in a specific language and let us know if everything was correct. We continue to use Fiverr till this day for minor edits on the Slidebean website. We’ve become repeat buyers of our Fiverr translator and now that we’ve developed a relationship with many of the sellers, they are often willing to translate a few extra words for free.
What projects have you used Fiverr for? Let us know in the comments below.
The post How to Translate Your Startup Website the Lean Way appeared first on Official Fiverr Blog.