Our "Crowdsourced" Translation Strategy + How to become an Official Translator!

Hello and welcome everyone. This is Mike. I'm the founder and CEO of SuiteDash. SuiteDash is the ultimate all-in-one business software multi-tool. Perfect for small to medium-sized businesses seeking to streamline and automate their systems and processes.

Our goal with this podcast is to provide you with a steady stream of useful and entertaining updates, tips, tricks, interviews, and insights that will help you maximize the impact of SuiteDash on your business and your life. Hello everyone. This is Mike. Welcome back to the Succeed with Software Podcast. Today we're going to talk about something that's really special inside SuiteDash.

And this is something that not many people may be aware of, and that's our official translator program. So, as many of you probably know, SuiteDash is fully translatable into just about any language in the world. But, I want you to understand how it's constructed and how it works because it's rather elegant, and this architecture enables us to do a great many things that might not be typically possible with some other methods of translation. So, the first thing to get out of the way is it's definitely not one of these machine translations. Meaning, there are many APIs that you can plug into and get translations from a machine translation, much like if you ask Google to translate something.

It would have been quite easy for us to plug into those APIs and say, "Okay, we're going to translate our whole app, and we're going to use this machine translation, and that's what you get. We hope it's accurate. We hope you agree with how it's translated, and that'll be the end." But, that's the easy way, and we don't always do things the easy way here. We do things the right way. And so, the right way is we provided a translation tool that works like this.

You can translate every string in the platform into your native language, one string at a time. Yes. But, you can also just reword every string in the platform into the language that's you use, say, with your customers. So, the default language for SuiteDash is English. And if you want to say something differently than the way that we decided to say it in English, you can just go find that string in translation and just change it.

The architecture that I'm referring to enables this on a string-by-string basis. So, anywhere in the platform that you see something that's not quite the way that you would say it, or you use a different word to associate with your customers for that concept or for that element, you can just change it in all the places that you can find it. We provide a nice search that searches all the strings, and then you can go through each string and modify it to fit the way that you want to use it. One example that we see a lot of is with attorneys or paralegals. They will use projects, the whole projects toolkit, but they will go through and change everywhere the word project is used, and they'll use matter or matters, the plural version, or case or cases in some of the examples.

Another popular one is work request gets changed to work orders. Some people have changed estimates to quotes. Examples like that. But, that's all perfectly possible, and it's just another way that we allow you to adapt the platform to fit your unique business. So, yes, it works in that way.

But, of course, also it works in the way that you might imagine that if, say, you wanted to have the platform in Spanish or in French or in traditional Chinese, even. There are predefined translation sets that are just one click away from loading into your translation toolkit, saving, and then that translation set is then applied in your platform. And really, all that translation set is is every single string taken and translated into that language and all saved into one translation set that's packaged for you to access immediately. But maybe your language isn't there, isn't offered as one of those predefined translation sets, we haven't gotten to it yet. And in that case, this same architecture allows you to do your own work and translate into the language that you need uniquely for you and your organization.

So, it's a really powerful construction, allows for infinite flexibility in so many different directions, and it really fits the needs of our customers. Now, you may wonder how those translation sets that I mentioned earlier, the Spanish, the French, the Italian, or whatever it is, how were they translated? And that's what I want to get to next, and that is our official translator program. So, how we approach this is by crowdsourcing from our community. So, anyone can become an official translator, and when you become an official translator, you're a translator for a specific language.

And in exchange, there is compensation offered. That's something that you need to contact the help team and discuss. But yes, we very much appreciate our official translators, and we do our best to create mutually beneficial relationships so that everyone is happy. We very much appreciate the time spent and the contribution to the community. And on that note, if you've already translated your account, please consider becoming an official translator because we can use that translation, and with your permission, we can contribute that also to the community.

So, how does it work as an official translator? As I said, we're a community crowdsource model, and you'd be assigned to a specific language, the one of course that you are fluent in and able to translate. When you're approved as an official translator, in the account of your choice, we'll enable the official translator dashboard. And this is an entire toolkit on its own that's specifically designed for this purpose. And let's just use Spanish as an example.

If you became an official translator for Spanish, you would be only one of many official translators for the Spanish language. And in the translator dashboard, similar to the translation toolkit that everyone has access to, every string in the platform, meaning every phrase, word, word combinations, labels, all that is represented there in the dashboard. And assuming that there's already one translation created by another official translator, someone that came before you, there will be a first place translation, is the best way to say it. And by that first place translation is a first place metal icon, like a gold medal in the Olympics. And the other translations that were also provided are listed below that.

And the way that order is derived is that each official translator assigned to that language will be able to upvote or downvote a translation for any specific string. So, in short, whichever translation for a specific string gets the most upvotes, that's the first place, the gold medal winner, and that's the one that gets packaged up into the official translation of Spanish and gets loaded into accounts as other SuiteMates want to load the Spanish translation set into their accounts. Now, if none of the official translators have provided a translation for a specific string, the field will be empty, and of course there is no first place or gold medal winner there, and this means you're the first one to that spot, so your translation will become the gold medal winner until or unless it's outvoted by someone else who might come later in the process. So, if you become a new official translator, let's say I become a new official translator for Spanish, I'm going to show up in my official translator dashboard, and I'm going to start looking through all the strings.

Well, in general, it could be pretty quick because you could be looking at each string one by one and just look at the provide translation and say, "Oh, yeah, that looks good to me. I agree with that." You give it a thumbs up, that's another vote, it's already the gold medal winner, it remains the gold medal winner, and you just move to the next one. So, if the official translators that have come before you do a great job, then all you have to do is just go through and thumbs up, thumbs up, thumbs up as you work your way down. If you don't like the gold medal winner, you can open up and see all the options and maybe thumbs up another one of the options if you don't like any of the options you have, a blank field where you can enter your own option and you can try to win the gold medal. And so, this is a true crowdsourced model, not just a crowdsourced model, but a crowd-decided model based on input from everyone and using the upvoting paradigm.

So, I think you can see here our goal is to get teams of official translators working on each language, and in that framework, each official translator has a smaller job because everyone is working together to arrive at the best translation possible for each string. And this strategy also helps us continue to maintain the translation sets. As you know, we release features very often, and those new features come with new strings, new translations. So, as the next official translator for Spanish or any language comes on to the team, then very likely most of the translation is already done for the features that were previously released, but the newly released features might not have been gotten to yet, and then this new official translator will see that and take care of that. And as it new official translators enter the system, those newer features will be covered and so on and so on.

So, it's a rather elegant system that relies on the community, but also does a good job of not having to rely on one single person, and it helps distribute the work among the official translators for any individual language. And it does a good job of maintaining each translation set by making sure that newly released features get covered by those who are just entering as official translators. So, with all that said, I would encourage anyone out there who has done some translation or is capable of helping us with a translation for one or more languages, please reach out to the help team by emailing help@sweet-dash.com and let them know that you're interested, and it'll just be a casual conversation back and forth until you understand what's required of you and what compensation you would be happy with, etc. And once we're all happy there, we can get the official translator dashboard activated for you and you'll be well on your way. I'd like to take this opportunity also to thank all our existing official translators.

All of you are doing an incredible job, and on behalf of the community, thank you very much. Okay, everyone, that'll do it for this episode of the Succeed with Software Podcast. Hope you enjoyed it. See you in the next one. Thanks.

Bye.