Transifex & Trello

Trello helps teams move work forward. It is the easy, free, flexible, and visual way to manage your projects and organize anything, trusted by millions of people from all over the world.

What started as an internal project management tool evolved into a globally recognized platform for managing, organizing, and prioritizing tasks and projects. Trello VP of Marketing, Stella Garber, and her team saw accelerated product adoption from users in global markets and were looking for a way to reach and engage these customers in their native language.

Trello is made up of a marketing website, a web app, iOS and Android apps, and an API server. Each product has strings that need to be translated and localized, a lengthy undertaking. Knowing localization would result in a lot of project management overhead, testing, and validation, the Trello team was looking for a single solution that would support all of their localization efforts and satisfy the needs of each department, from development to marketing.

The ideal solution would provide flexibility to translate strings from various products, but still make it easy to manage the entire localization process for individual projects.

The Trello team selected Transifex because it gave them complete control and visibility into the localization process. Trello VP of Marketing, Stella Garber, shares that “Transifex was crucial to our process in that it provided a centralized, standard location for all of our developers and translators to work on translations. The translation UI is excellent; this allowed our translators to work quickly and effectively, and our developers to jump in and answer questions where needed.” 

Trello used the Transifex platform to crowdsource a majority of their translations. “These users know our product more than any professional translators and are capable of reproducing the tone of our brand which is very important to us.” With a crowd comprised of more than 500 passionate Trello users from around the world, being able to use Transifex to see, at a glance, how translations were progressing made it easy to manage multiple translation projects at once. Other in-platform features like the glossary are particularly helpful in making sure all translations are as consistent as possible. 

When updates or changes are made to any one of Trello’s products, the product’s owner has the ability to upload strings to Transifex at any time. From there, Trello’s translation agency, e2f, will pick up the strings, translating them to 20 languages in 2 to 3 business days. “The fact that e2f is integrated in Transifex is really important as it allows to automate all of the translation process.”

Driven by data and a lot of locale-specific testing, Trello’s global expansion plans have proved successful, specifically in Brazil where they saw signups double with their Portuguese launch. Thanks to continued local marketing, they’ve been able to maintain this growth rate, and have seen Trello use in Brazilian Portuguese increase by 35%. Today, Trello has successfully launched in 20 different languages, engaging users on a tremendous global scale.