Tips/Advise on how to make a SaaS multilingual?
Hi IH community!
I'm very happy cause thru IH I found 2 co-founders and we are actively building our 2nd MVP based on a SaaS model but we have it in Spanish at the moment and we want to be able to add multiple languages to the app - the usual multilingual functionality.
I have before used a google API to translate the content for my tourism marketplace but perhaps there's a better way to do it for a web app?
Any tips, tricks and feedback is most certainly welcomed!
Cheers!
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The hardest part isn't the initial translation - it's keeping everything in sync as you ship new features. Here's what's worked well:
First, add i18n-validate to your CI pipeline with --strict --fail-on-error. It catches missing keys and broken placeholders before they reach users.
Second, use pseudo-localization early on to find UI layout issues before you pay for real translations.
For the translations themselves, i18n-agent has a GitHub integration that translates your i18n files directly in your repo - saves a lot of the copy-paste workflow between translation tools and your codebase.
Tech aside I would strongly suggest to invest in professional translations. I used more than one app that used very bad translated texts and it’s a big turn off.
Properly translate your app to English first and then go with the credo: professional translation > english > deepl/Google translate whatever.
Thank you @oguera! I speak spanish and english and those are the first 2 target languages and couldn't agree more about getting some real translators! Appreciate the help!
At the company I worked at, we used https://react.i18next.com/ basically, just a lot of translation strings in json. Many mobile apps do something similar as well. Another common translation format uses PO files, but I don’t have any experience with it.
I also decided to implement translations for my app, because adding them in later would be a huge headache. I went with https://github.com/isaachinman/next-i18next which again uses translation strings in json.
However, I still like being able to use structured content—think markdown on indiehackers, with headings, italics, bold—so I have my own solution for getting and translating markdown files.
I researched the best machine translation api, and it seems the DeepL is better than Google translate.
I ended up building a custom cli in my project to detect when any changes are made to the English version, it will automatically detect, translate, and update only those places in other languages for both markdown and json. It will also detect and error in the CI if I forget to translate it locally. I don’t want to have to waste my time on it manually.
If you don’t care about markdown and don’t want to spend time building custom tooling, then I’d recommend json translations with https://www.codeandweb.com/babeledit which is a reasonable, quick, and decent solution.
Oh, and another pain is multilingual sitemaps too.
Anyway, g’luck!
Thank you for the thorough inside @fromtheexchange! I remember using PO files on another WP project I had and i'm a bit familiar with DeepL but this is really great and super appreciated! I'm going to have the team take a look as well to see how we best fit the translations as nowadays is super important. Thanks again for the tips!
The best advice I’ve gotten is to get professional translation. We’re considering using https://www.dittowords.com/ for CoffeePals for managing copyright. They have a great SDK for managing it in your app and provides a web ui for people managing the copyright. We also use crisp for support and they have live translation. Hope that helps for the tech side!
this is great @chris_png much appreciated! I will share with the team for them to take a look! Cheers!
Not an answer you may like, but some people are Localization Managers/specialists and they spend their time localizing products into different languages.
They don't necessarily translate the product themselves, but they work with the translators, manage the budget, and keep the going smoothly. They usually are also proficient in a few languages and serve as Q/A for the project.
The one thing to look out for is how localization friendly your product is today. Certain terms or phrases in English don't translate nicely into other languages, so it takes some creativity on the translator's part to make it work.
@sethking I had not heard about this, very interesting and thanks for sharing!
We did run into the issue as we did our website in english and then I translated it to spanish, but certainly there are specific words and phrases that need to be changed a 100% cause otherwise they don't make sense lol!
I'll look into this as well - cheers!
I think that @oguera has a good tip, but you can translate using a Google Translate or something like that and then submit to a revision of a qualified professional. Maybe its has been less expensive. It is a different aproach.
Thank you @clientela_crm