Beekeeper & Transifex

Beekeeper is a platform for frontline workers and teams to communicate and coordinate more efficiently. As an essential mobile tool trusted by global businesses – like Hilton, Domino’s Pizza, and Heathrow Airport, among others – Beekeeper required a solution that supports its global team and content localization needs. This case study explores why Beekeeper chose Transifex as the first and only stop for addressing their global localization needs.

Beekeeper has been a multicultural company since its founding, resulting in a global team who spoke multiple languages that contributed to the company’s global growth efforts. Given this the Beekeeper team required a solution that would enable multiple people within the organization to translate content in parallel, while also fitting easily into their current workflows.   

On top of this, Beekeeper needed a platform that would enable them to seamlessly push the most up-to-date localized content of their product across the platforms in which it lives: web, native mobile apps for iOS and Android, Help Center articles, and other customer-facing products.

 Given the span of content, languages, and team roles that they needed to engage for their localization efforts — they needed a Translation Management Software (TMS) solution that would address all these needs and help take their business to the next level.

Before Transifex, Beekeeper stored translations in their code base that only software developers had access to for changes and updates. “With Transifex, we gained the flexibility of allowing other employees to start translating the product. Transifex allowed us to leverage team-wide localization efforts, which was a great help to a small startup,” shares Merada Richter, Engineering Operations Manager at Beekeeper.

Chat & Review: With Transifex’s full suite of collaborative features, the Beekeeer team can interact directly with translators while also translating some text in-house when needed, resulting in a faster translation process and lower turnaround time. 

Glossary: The Beekeeper app has many unique terms (for example, “Streams” which literally means bodies of water, but within the Beekeeper environment means a newsfeed). Given this, the team uses the Glossary feature to keep the meaning of these terms when translated into other languages.

Workflow integration: “Transifex fits well into our workflow. We can separate our localization from the feature implementation, reducing the overhead of supporting multiple languages.”

Translator Flexibility: Given that different projects and languages require different translators, Transifex is giving the Beekeeper team all the freedom they needed to switch between translators in order to maintain a high quality of text in their product.

Ease of Use for All Roles: “Starting was relatively easy, and we included Transifex into our CI/CD pipeline very early on. From the beginning, we made use of the Transifex CLI and integrated it directly into our development workflow. We were happy that no manual steps were required to enable localization in our apps. For the translators, it was easy enough to get started with translating the strings.”

Translation Quality: Translation review and quality, which was previously a blocker for the Beekeeper team, was no longer an issue in the development cycle with the help of Transifex. The platform enabled the team to delegate full quality control and ownership of the translated text to product owners, who are able to verify translations directly from the central dashboard. 

Automation: “The most positive thing about Transifex is that we don’t have to worry about it. It just works. The workflows are fully automated and the translations happen continuously with our translation partner. It doesn’t require heavy maintenance effort from our part. Transifex is fast, seamless, and integrates so well within our existing workflows that we hardly notice it’s there.”

With the Transifex platform, Beekeeper found all the features and capabilities it was looking for to address its business needs. As a result, the team was able to eliminate the need to manually cross-team and cross-market localization efforts: “Translation is seamlessly integrated into our development lifecycle, allowing us to reach a worldwide audience with our product. We’ve been able to expand into new markets and swiftly onboard large international customers, reaching every single employee, regardless of which language they speak,” shares Richtor.

When asked what specific metrics and KPIs the team was monitoring, Merada replied: “Transifex has provided us with hassle-free translations, excellent customer service and all-round great product. The best metric is that we’ve been happy customers for 6 years!”