Deezer & Transifex

Deezer connects 16 million monthly active users around the world to more than 70 million tracks. Available in over 180 countries worldwide, Deezer gives instant access to one of the largest and most diverse global music streaming catalog on any device. Deezer is the only music streaming service with Flow, the unique mix of all your old favorites and new recommendations in one ever-changing stream. Based on an intuitive, proprietary algorithm and created by people who love music, it’s the only place to hear all your music back-to-back with fresh discoveries tailored to you. Deezer is available on your favorite device, including smartphone, tablet, PC, laptop, home sound system, connected car or smart TV.

Deezer Localization team centralizes all translation needs of the company in 35 languages for all assets (product, marketing, support, etc.). The Localization team is working closely with product managers, copywriters and UX designers to ensure the localizability in all supported languages and that all reference material (screenshots, specifications) is available on time for translation. The team is responsible for the formatting and publication of the strings into Transifex.

The web platform is updated daily and the mobile apps are updated every two weeks. The Deezer team organizes weekly translation sessions to support this continuous localization effort and Deezer agile development. They work with a team of external professional translators, in-house copywriters and in-house non-linguist reviewers.

“Back in 2016, only half of the content was going through the translation tool, which generated consistency and quality issues, and also extra costs.”, shared Joaquine Barbet, Senior Localization Manager at Deezer.

The key requirements for the Deezer team were:

• support of diverse assets and file types
• easy onboarding for non-linguists
• advanced features for translation (instructions, contextualization, consistency, plural management)
• easy to connect with proprietary tools through an API

Transifex was already the solution chosen by Deezer when the current Localization team joined, but the use of the tool was not global, nor optimized. The Localization team’s initial mission was to evangelize and convince stakeholders (product managers, product designers, developers), in order to enhance the localization management workflow and in the end, better answer their needs. “We also saw many improvements and additional features in Transifex in the past 5 years, and this helped us to extend its use to teams who were first reluctant.” , highlighted Joaquine.

For Deezer, the platform’s reliability and robustness are fundamental for building this trustful partnership:

UI/interface: easy to use and intuitive for project managers, experienced translators and even for non-linguists.

Contextualization: adding instructions, defining size limits and mapping strings in screenshots are great features to help teams provide the most accurate translations.

Glossary: a must-have for any translation tool, it is easily accessible while translating and automatic insertion of the translated term is handy.

Comments: translation query management made easy. Deezer has connected Transifex to Slack so that they are directly and quickly notified when a new question is raised.

Plural management: a must-have feature when localizing into Slavic languages, Arabic or Hebrew.

Tagging/Filtering: Joaquine and her team use tags to identify/categorize content, or to prioritize which strings to translate. There are also many different filters that can be combined together to find content more quickly.

Consistency: this is a key element for our team and several features allow us to reach this goal – Translation memory fill-up, TM group, Search strings.

Connection and sync with our translation key management tool and CMS for editorial content. Zendesk, used by our Customer support team to manage knowledge base.

Support: “Transifex team is quick to answer when we have a question or raise an issue. We are also glad to be part of their Beta testers and to help them improve their product.”, noted Joaquine. 

Transifex has now become Deezer’s central translation tool and 98% of the content that goes in their weekly workflow is translated through it. This allows the Deezer Localization team to have better control on the workflow, on quality and to ensure consistency throughout assets, while delivering content within a 3-day turnaround with the help of 100+ collaborators.

From a French tech start-up, Deezer has now grown to a fully global service, bringing local experience to its million users.