If you’re targeting international audiences, you need to adapt content and products so they speak the local language. This is otherwise known as localization.
Localization goes beyond mere translation. It involves adapting cultural, linguistic and regional preferences so you create personalized customer experiences that resonate with local audiences worldwide, helping you build trust, foster relationships, and drive conversions across different markets.
Dive into this guide, where you’ll explore tips on how to streamline localization efforts across design and content, for a seamless and efficient process.
First, here’s a quick overview of the two platforms:
Lokalise is an advanced translation management system (TMS), which offers a single place for all translation stakeholders(developers, designers, translators) to collaborate on localized text. With Lokalise, teams can utilize In-context and real-time collaboration features to accurately translate words across their product.
Ditto serves as a single source of truth for product text, connecting text from draft to design to development in a content design system. With composable text components, Ditto helps work integrate all of their product text into a centralized source.
In this post, we’ll share some tips on how best to streamline collaboration between everyone involved in creating a localized product, starting in the design stage. We’ll also cover how you can utilize the Ditto and Lokalise integration to tackle design-stage localization with your team.
Design-stage localization is an approach that integrates localization at the very core of product development, and is done at the design stage.
Unlike the traditional post-release localization approach, design stage localization involves starting the localization process alongside product development. By doing so, fully localized prototypes are created ahead of time, reducing delays and ensuring a smoother localization process.
Some key benefits of design stage localization include:
To implement design stage localization effectively, teams can leverage tools like Ditto and Lokalise. Ditto enables a single source of truth for product text earlier in the process, from draft to design to development.
Lokalise, on the other hand, handles the localization process, ensuring that translations are integrated seamlessly into the product. Together, these tools provide teams with a unified and streamlined workflow for design stage localization.
One of the key aspects of streamlining localization efforts is fostering cross-functional collaboration between design and content teams. By establishing a single source of truth for design and content, teams can ensure consistency, accuracy, and efficiency throughout the localization process.
Ditto, a powerful tool designed specifically for this purpose, allows teams to have a centralized repository for all product text. From the initial draft to the final design, Ditto enables designers, developers, and content creators to work with visual context, ensuring coherence in the product experience. With Ditto, everyone involved can access the latest version of the content and collaborate effectively, reducing miscommunication and errors.
Additionally, Lokalise plays a vital role in the localization process by seamlessly integrating with Ditto. By connecting Lokalise with Ditto, teams can easily manage translations, ensuring that all localized content is accurately reflected in the design files.
This integration eliminates the need for manual copy-pasting and enables teams to preview translated text directly in their design files, saving time and ensuring a consistent localization experience.
Consistency is a critical aspect of localization, and reusing translations can significantly contribute to achieving this goal. With Lokalise's capabilities and Ditto components, teams can ensure that translations are consistent across their product.
By leveraging Lokalise's translation memory and terminology management features, teams can save time and effort by reusing previously translated content. This not only enhances consistency but also reduces the risk of errors and ensures a smoother localization process. Additionally, by integrating with Ditto components, repeated text only needs to get translated once – and the already-translated text will get automatically brought into all of the places where the component is attached.
Moreover, the integration between Ditto and Lokalise allows teams to streamline the reuse of translations. With translations stored in Lokalise, designers and developers can easily access and incorporate them into their design files using Ditto. This eliminates the need for manual translation updates and ensures that all stakeholders are working with the most up-to-date and accurate translations.
One of the key challenges in localization is maintaining the integrity of the design while accommodating translated text. With translations from Lokalise syncing with Ditto variants, teams can preview localized text directly in their design files without any extra work using variant previews. This enables designers to visualize how the translated text will fit within the design and make necessary adjustments to ensure a seamless user experience.
By combining Ditto and Lokalise, teams can preview translations in real-time, ensuring that the design remains functional and cohesive across different languages. This gets rid of manual work and reduces the risk of design breaks or inconsistencies.
While content and design teams are localizing content and design, it should be easy for developers to access translations directly from the design files, so they can implement localized text in parallel.
By integrating Lokalise and Ditto with design tools like Figma, developers can easily retrieve the necessary information for localization, ensuring a smooth transition from design to development.
This seamless handover process saves time, eliminates miscommunication, and enables developers to focus on implementing the localized content effectively.
By implementing these best practices, businesses can achieve efficiency, consistency, and exceptional user experiences across different markets
Streaming localization is critical.
By integrating Lokalise and Ditto into the design and content localization workflow, global companies can create user-centric products and services that resonate with local markets, fostering stronger connections and driving global success.
Add Lokalise and Ditto to your workflow
Rachel Wolff is a Content Manager at Lokalise. Thank you Rachel for joining us on the Ditto blog!
