The Internet is vast. So vast and rich in tools, you can now expand and localize your business painlessly to any country while drinking your morning coffee.
So let's take one of the examples. We have a customer X. Customer X has already successfully deployed a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) integration with Frends that included EDI (Electronic data interchange) and trigger-based creation of invoices.
Later on, customer X asks: "Hey Paweł, what if I wanted to expand to other markets? I have a translator, and she can translate some pages into German. I think she might use excel, and we can upload an excel to the Frends platform, and by using this data, we can localize our product. What do you think?"
I asked then:
- How many products are there? How extensive is the database? (As it turned out, there were around 6,000 items);
- How long would it then take to translate the content?;
- How costly would it be?;
- What's your ROI?;
- What is the benefit of having perfect translation?*
These questions made me think about big e-commerce companies and wonder whether we should follow their example.
As you may already know, Amazon or AliExpress use an autotranslation feature. The purpose is to help visitors make sense of the website, but translation accuracy is not always a top priority. For example, you would like to localize your webshop or website into different languages. Let's take Polish and Finnish as examples. As a result, the button "Your Orders" in English can turn into "Twoje Rozkazy" in Polish. "It does mean "an order" in Polish but not a shopping one, more as "giving orders to someone to do something." Even without knowing English, a Polish-speaking visitor could still easily navigate the platforms with such direct and automated translations. Hence, when shopping, we are not looking for much consistency, but the result remains pretty much similar: Order is made, and sales grow.
So I propose that customer X first do automatic translations using Google Translate. Then by looking at the traffic and statistics, we fix parts of the platform that are not consistent. By doing this, we optimized the whole process and saved lots of time, as we needed to localize a growing database.
So here how the process worked:
1. Picking a multilingual translation service. We chose API Google Translate as it is well documented, provides many language options, and supports text and HTML (if not Google Translate, you can always pick any other that has API or can produce ingestable data (file, queue));
2. Choosing a server. We will run our process on it. Good thing we did not need to choose any, as our Frends license had the cloud agent included on which we could deploy whatever we wanted;
3. Launching a browser. We need to access Frends panel to design and run our process. Good news, since you're reading this article, you already have that. So no time spent on that, too;
4. Preparing the list of target languages. We picked 6 for starters. You can easily pick much more;
5. Modelling Frends process to fit our e-commerce API. In a nutshell, iterate over each translatable item, ask for a translation, and update item. .NET code, loops, and exception handling did the trick;
6. Grand finale: the final result looks as this (simple!) – each segment is grouped in respective subprocesses that can be launched on demand, on schedule, or by API.
*If you don't want to get as technical, scroll past screenshots and read why this approach works so much better than writing a new standalone application.
Looking at each subprocess, it seems a little more complicated, but this is to be honest, the most complex part of the whole project.
Looking at each subprocess, it seems a little more complicated, but this is, to be honest, the most complex part of the whole project.
Low-code use was up to our preference, but you can also create visual loops without having any programming skills. And if you don't know how to do something, you always have guys at support@frends.com or the community who could help.
A bonus in this process is that we made it reusable and scalable. Do you need the same process for another platform or website? What we need to do is simply change environment variables, and it will do the job: Here is how the final process running and monitoring view will look like in the frends UI:
Here is how the final process running and monitoring view will look like in the frends UI:
Result
To translate an e-commerce business to 6 languages in a day, we used solely one solution - Frends. Usually, we use Frends for integrations. In this case, we utilized it to perform a programming task, and we ended up with a complete, transparent application, easy to be changed, launch, and monitor. All you need is a browser.
As you can see, without knowing any code, you can create API, functions, translations, processes, and tasks. With low-code, anybody can code, even without a code, as it turns out :). Most importantly, there isn't a programming task that couldn't be written here as Frends supports pure .NET Core 2.0 and 4.5.7 with external nuggets that you may include. Moreover, it lets you launch anything like JAVA or Python on your target server when there is an installed agent.
Have a business case in mind? Any localization challenges? Do not hesitate to reach us to discuss your ideas!
- Sweden: Kristoffer Lundegren at kristoffer.lundegren@frends.com
- Poland: Pawel Kowalski at pawel.kowalski@hiqpoland.pl
- Finland & the world: Juha Moisio at juha.moisio@hiq.fi
or book a demo meeting at any time that suits you.
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