Transifex: By Developers for Developers, from Day One

Next month, the Transifex team is headed to DeveloperWeek 2020, taking place in our SF Bay Area this year. Today, we sit at the beginning of a new year and gear up for the exciting week of catching up with the world’s tech leaders at this annual ‘epicenter of developer innovation.’ In preparation, we take a step back to see exactly what tech-driven innovation our development team has been working on — and what we’ll be bringing to the table this year and decade.

(Before the conference, if you’d like a first-hand look inside the localization technology being used by the world’s fastest-moving companies, sign up for our 15-day free trial!)

So in the #DevWeek2020 spirit, here’s a reflection on the developer-focused philosophy and product that our team has been building over the last decade, and a preview of the exciting localization technology road ahead.

From Open Source to B2B SaaS & Beyond

Since day one, our product was built by developers for developers. What started out as an open-source translation software launched in 2009 by our founder Dimitris Glezos, has now evolved into a powerful localization software used by the world’s fastest-moving companies.

Since the birth of Transifex, we have been on a mission to break down language barriers — by making localization accessible to everyone. To achieve this, we have prioritized investing in top talent to help us invest in the true scalability and maintainability of our product. In doing so, we have iterated on and expanded our set of quality standards, which has grown into an engineering manifesto informing every single product action we take.

Going Global Means Moving at the Rate of Technology (Read: Very Fast)

With the rate of technology evolving at an exponentially increasing pace, the world has not only become more interconnected than ever before — but the stakes of the localization game have gotten higher. As of today, over 75% of Fortune 500 companies have invested in localization to grow their global presence; a percentage that is growing with time, and influencing companies of all sizes (including startups!) to play on a global scale.

In short, not only are companies behind if they have not yet localized to capture their global audiences, but they will remain behind if they aren’t up-to-speed on the best technologies and resources that will enable them to go global. Fortunately here at Transifex, after over a decade of taking fast-moving companies global by building a product for teams to easily stay agile, we have coined some great agile processes and best practices to help every team – from the small, the agile, the developer-heavy, the business-centric, and everyone in between.

Paving the Way for Technology-Driven Localization

As we enter the new decade and what will undoubtedly be another new era of localization technology growth and evolution, our team is dedicated to continuing to build a meaningful product that not only makes localization more accessible for all but also drives the next generation of localization technology.

To date, we have built a wide range of integrations — from Slack and LexiQA to GitHub and KantanMT –  for our users to be able to easily work and optimize within their technology stacks and bring their content to the world. And with more and more feedback from the developers, localization managers, and team leads, we look forward to continuing to iterate on our product and build impactful features that will set the foundation for what localization will look like in the future.

Although we may not know what the future looks like (perhaps it will be dominated by the rising tide of Machine Technology integrated with human-in-the-loop translation), we know one thing for certain: it is the developers of our team, inspired and motivated by the greater developer community, that will pave the way for this next generation of technology-driven localization.

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To learn more about the best localization practices that agile teams can employ to effectively go global, download our Complete 2020 Localization Guide for Agile Teams.