The Client

Our client is a US-based online direct delivery company for food, groceries, alcohol, home essentials, third-party orders, and more. They have over 10,000 employees who work across more than 1,000 micro-fulfillment centers.

The Business Case

Our client wanted to expand their business and services across Canada and Europe. That’s why they sought out a partner that could quickly localize their applications into German, French, Spanish, and UK and Canadian English.

The Challenges

When the SoftServe team began their discovery, they uncovered a few challenges facing their team.

First, the client’s aggressive deadlines and required live release roadmap alignment meant an extremely fast turnaround. With hardcoded localization strings, our team was unable to see the full project scope or estimate the time it might take. Yet, our client’s deadline was definitive with the SoftServe team having only two months to take this project from start to finish.

The next challenge was the extensive and varied amounts of information requiring localization into five separate languages. This not only required localizing the customer facing application for online order processing, but it also required localizing the supporting apps for order inventory, scheduling, drivers, the website, Android and iOS frameworks, email, SMS notifications, award and discount policies, and more.

Lastly, the client, the localization team, and the translators were spread across different time zones, so collaboration was more difficult.

The Solution

Thankfully, SoftServe has experience with tight deadlines and seemingly impossible tasks. After the two-week discovery period, our team built a solid workflow that successfully delivered the localization our client needed within their timeline.

Typically, a localization project’s workflow would start with the localization team receiving the strings which they would then share with the translation vendor to be translated. Next, the localization team would get back the translations from the vendor, review them, and deliver the translated strings for implementation.

However, this project’s hardcoded strings and tight turnaround time required a different workflow. First, hardcoded strings meant our development team had to manually extract them from the app, with our localization team then providing the German translation while the vendors covered the other languages.

As the vendor had engaged native speakers, there were significant time differences between translators. This meant it was essential these translators received the strings ASAP in order to meet the deadline. In addition, this project involved continuous localization, meaning new strings were coming in at all hours of the day and night while translating was ongoing.

Thankfully, the use of a localization tool made file management significantly easier. The process was further streamlined by having automatic translation memory, where commonly used words or phrases would be stored so they didn’t require translation each time.

Despite the challenges, the translations were delivered within the deadlines. The SoftServe QA team then continuously tested both the translations and process flows, fixing any translation-related bugs before integration. Once thoroughly tested and integrated, the localized applications and services were launched.

The Outcome

With SoftServe successfully delivering localized apps in five different languages, our client was able to meet their launch deadlines and business goals. SoftServe also internationalized the previously hardcoded strings so that any future localization projects would be significantly faster and easier. Now that our client has expanded across Canada and Europe, they are poised for further financial and structural growth.

LET’S TALK if you’re ready to drive successful localization projects even under complicated conditions.