E-commerce Website Localization – Case study

About the client

An Indian e-commerce company, headquartered in Bangalore is in multiple product categories such as consumer electronics, fashion, home essentials, groceries, and lifestyle products.

Business Requirements

Client wants to extend their presence across the globe. So, they were looking for different partners who could assist them in localization in different languages. Fidel was selected for its linguistics and technical capabilities.

Project details

Service-Translation, API development, testing
Source language: English
Target languages: Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Marathi, Malayalam, Odia, and Punjabi.
Volume: 3,000,000 words per language.
TAT: 90 days

Challenges

Client needed to localize their e-commerce site into multiple languages. E-commerce companies like Flipkart, Amazon, Myntra, Nayaka, etc. have a unique translation challenge, as they have potentially thousands of new products going live on their websites every day. Any delay in translation means a delay in online sales. E-commerce websites also have diverse types of content. Not only do they have product text and descriptions, but they also have images, marketing content, and other site elements that require translation.

Solution

Fidel set up a API enabled system by which client could upload & download the files for product text translation twice/thrice a day. This would include product descriptions from thousands of brands carried by their online stores.

Apart from this, Fidel team also setup an online translation process where the files were automatically analyzed and post translation, an automatic quality check would run on the same platform thereby allowing the finalized content to be imported automatically.

Further Fidel team also developed a separate process for translators, editors and QA team. As there were many members working on this project, a dedicated, customized web-based platform was created where Fidel could add and manage the entries of the work done by various linguists.

Tools

Multiple tools were used to process the project including some 3rd party tools and some in-house built solutions:

• Trados and Memsource tool for translation and review.
• For QA, X-bench and Trados supported QA tools.
• Python based tools /scripts were created to further process files and separate DNT (Do not translate) strings from the source files.
• An PHP Rest API (MVC Model) based system Integration between Client LS (localization system) and internal systems at Fidel was also created.

Conclusions

Working collaboratively with the client team, Fidel was able to create a system that allowed products and marketing copy to be localized and translated almost in real time. This ensures that the client’s ecommerce sites are up to date in different languages and allows the client to get to market quickly with a broader reach with local language UI leveraging technology driven solution.