How to manage your own translators

This guide will walk you through the process of translating your content using human translators that you invite to your Localize team. You'll learn how to prepare your content for human translation, how to define Glossary terms, add context to phrases, and create a Style Guide. Finally, you’ll learn how to use the Translation QA Workflow to help with your translation management process.

What you'll learn

How to segment your content for professional translation
How to define Glossary terms, Context, and Style Guides
How to invite your translators to the Localize dashboard
How to add human translations for your content
How to use the Translation QA Workflow feature

Prerequisites

You have phrases in the Pending bin.
You have enabled the Advanced Translation QA Workflow option in your Project Settings.

Segmenting your content for professional translation

Deciding what content to translate

Localize offers a few key features that allow you to choose what phrases in your project need professional translation and who will translate them.

Pages Filter: Select content using the Pages filter.
a. The Pages filter segments your content based on where it was found in your website.
b. If you prefer to work on translations one page or section at-a-time, select the page(s)/subfolder(s) using this filter, then use Labels to mark those phrases.
Labels: Mark and assign specific content using Labels.
a. Custom Labels: You can create a custom label using a translator’s name or “needs-translation” for example, and apply that label to the phrases that need to be translated.
Created date: Select content using the Created filter.
a. After the initial translation of your content, you will want to periodically check for new phrases that are found by Localize.
b. You can simplify this process by using the Created filter and setting the filter to the appropriate time span (e.g. 7 days, 30 days).

How to define Glossary terms, Context, and Style Guides

Define Glossary terms for consistent translations

You likely have key terminology that you want to have translated consistently across your project.

You can enter these words/phrases to your project’s Glossary.
Glossary terms are shown to the translator when they are translating that phrase.

Communicate the meaning of your phrases using Phrase Context

You can add specific context to each published phrase to help translators better understand its meaning.

The context can be a text description of the context and/or a screenshot or other graphic.

Create your Style Guide

A Style Guide provides guidelines for your translators to use when translating your content for a new audience. These guidelines examine areas like the tone of the translation, types of words to use, punctuations, language style, purpose, brand voice, and so on.

Your Style Guide will be available to your translators, providing overall context to the translators.
The Style Guide is also a good place to provide a temporary login to your website if it’s behind a login gateway.

Invite your translators to translate using the Localize dashboard

Invite your translators

You can invite translators to your team so that they may use the tools available in the Localize dashboard to add human translations.

Invite your translators using these instructions
Give them the proper permissions to translate in the appropriate language(s)
Inform them how to find the content to translate

Adding translations using the Localize dashboard

Now that you translators have been invited, they can use the following tools to translate your content.

In-Context Editor: The In-Context Editor will provide your translators with visual context when adding and editing translations, so they can see where translations appear in your website.
Manage Phrases Page: On the Manage Phrases page, your translators can simply click on a phrase to add or edit the translation.

Using the Translation QA Workflow

Localize’s Translation QA Workflow is an easy-to-use tool that allows you to review and approve translations before they are published for your visitors/users. You’ll find a helpful instructional video here for using the Translation QA Workflow.

Start by approving phrases in the Pending Pin

If machine translations are enabled:
- Approved phrases are moved to the Translation QA bin under Needs Review. Machine translations are automatically provided and ready to be edited by your translators.
If machine translations are not enabled:
- Approved phrases are moved to the Translation QA bin under Needs Translation, ready for your translators to propose translations. Proposed translations will be moved to Needs Review.

Perform a quality review

Translations in the Translation QA bin under Needs Review can be either Published or Rejected for further revisions.

Additional instructions for using the Translation QA workflow can be found here.

Regularly assign translations

We recommend setting a recurring calendar event to review new incoming phrases and assign them to translators at least every 2 weeks, or when you do any large changes to your content.

The frequency that you review incoming phrases depends on how often your content changes.
You will be notified via email when new content is found by Localize.