Accelerating and Simplifying Localization During Rapid Growth

Case study featured image Livestorm | Phrase

With a rapidly growing customer base and a constantly evolving product, Livestorm’s localization process was struggling to keep up with the increasing number of text strings and locales. Aiming to accelerate, streamline, and centralize localization, Livestorm implemented Phrase Strings. The intuitive platform is helping Livestorm save time and minimize translation errors – and crucially, the Phrase solution will scale seamlessly as Livestorm continues to grow.

Results

  • Cut time to add new languages by 50%
  • Enabled Livestorm to double the size of its localization team without increasing complexity
  • Process automation eliminates manual tasks and minimizes translation errors
Stats & facts

Livestorm by the numbers

40
countries
17
languages
-50%
time spent on localization
1.6M
words processed

Challenge

More languages, more text strings, more complexity

When Livestorm launched in 2016, the majority of its customers were based in France and the USA—but it wasn’t long before it gained traction on a global scale. Today, Livestorm has customers in more than 40 countries, and catering to such a linguistically diverse user base is no easy task.

Thibaut Davoult, Growth Engineer at Livestorm, explains: “The Livestorm app is available in 16 languages, and we’re adding more on a regular basis. At the same time, we’re always working on new features, which means more text strings that need translating. As the number of locales and the volume of text grew, localization became increasingly complex.”

Livestorm incentivizes its users and customers to help with translations, but it relied on spreadsheets to manually collect language keys from contributors. Without a dedicated tool, gathering the translations was a time-consuming task, and version control was particularly painful.

Internally, the team developed a meticulous checklist to avoid mistakes while implementing a new language. Yet, as the scale of localization grew—with more languages, text strings, and employees involved—the checklist became more cumbersome than effective.

“Localization speed was becoming a problem,” continues Thibaut. “And developers were shouldering too much of the work load. We needed a way to accelerate and centralize the process, and we needed a solution that would be scalable as Livestorm continued to grow.”

Solution

Phrase Strings—easy to use, easy to implement

After carefully evaluating several localization solutions, Livestorm decided to implement Phrase Strings.

Robin Lambert, Co-Founder and Product Designer at Livestorm, leads the localization team, and was responsible for choosing the new solution. Robin comments: “By far the most important selection criterion for us was ease of migration from our old system. The last thing we wanted to do was manually reproduce all our spreadsheet data. Phrase Strings’ powerful importing tools and excellent onboarding team made it an easy decision.”

Livestorm was also impressed by Phrase Strings’ user-friendliness, and its extensive format support. Robin’s team works with both i18next and Rails i18n, so format flexibility was essential.

Phrase Strings consolidates all of Livestorm’s localization tasks into a single, easy-to-use dashboard. Translators can work directly through the dashboard, which completely eliminates the need for spreadsheets. Similarly, Phrase Strings enables a centralized, well-defined localization process, so Livestorm no longer has to worry about manually following a complex checklist.

Robin adds: “With the help of Phrase Strings’ Customer Success onboarding team, implementing the solution took less than two weeks. That is quite a feat considering how complicated our legacy process was when we made the switch.”

The localization management process is so much more streamlined, which makes it much easier to release new versions and add new locales.

Thibaut Davoult

Growth Engineer

Benefits

Simple and scalable

Livestorm is now perfectly positioned to deliver its web conferencing service in more languages and with more features than ever, without being held back by localization constraints.

“The localization process is so much more streamlined, which makes it much easier to release new versions and add new locales,” confirms Thibaut. “We’d say we’ve shortened the developer working time when adding new languages by 50%.”

Phrase Strings is delivering time-savings through a host of features. When maintaining spreadsheets, there was always a risk of accidentally deleting valid keys; but with Phrase Strings, that is a complete non-issue. Likewise, Phrase Strings’ search engine and progress tracking tools make it easy to find particular keys or see what needs translating. Last but not least, with Phrase Strings automating many of the processes that Livestorm developers used to perform manually, adding new languages is now significantly more straightforward.

Most importantly, Phrase Strings is fully scalable, so Livestorm will be able to keep enjoying all of the benefits even as the company size and scope of localization continue to grow.

Thibaut concludes: “Phrase Strings has already made it possible for us to double the number of people involved in localization internally, and that number should scale nicely as the team grows. It’s great knowing that we can expand the localization team without increasing the complexity of the process.”

Features used

Key Phrase Strings features that help Livestorm localize at scale

Checkmark icon | Phrase
API
The API allows you to import locale files, download locale files, tag keys, or interact in other ways with the localization data stored in your Phrase Strings account.
Checkmark icon | Phrase
User roles and access control
Organize your localization team by assigning dedicated roles and access rights to each team member according to projects and locales.
Checkmark icon | Phrase
Multiple projects
As software projects grow and become more complex it helps to split them into modules to keep things manageable. The same holds true for the localization of software projects.

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