I finally "finished" a giant #translation project at work. Translation management has always been something deeply interesting for me, growing up in a multilingual country but unfortunately, a lot of businesses don't take good care of their apps besides their mother language, forgetting how words are at the core of their #UX.

At first, we went on the easy road and hired a translation agency. Unfortunately, we quickly realised that most of the translations were of bad quality, lots of them were translated loosely and you could feel they were not native.

So for this project we wanted to do better and implemented several things:

- I hired independent translators for each language, ensuring they were natives. One for each language.
- Discussions happened in a shared Slack channel which allowed to centralise discussions and questions
- We used #Crowdin to handle the translation management and onboarding
- We created a "guide" of things we expected: the tone we wanted to keep, rules regarding gender-neutral terms and overall user experience, ...

The project went fantastic, I had the chance to work with wonderful women who totally understood our application, its tone and the overall experience we wanted to give to our users across the language barrier. While it took some time to get it started, it's exciting to see it finally done and live, and to be able to modify and adapt the translations on the go when we see there's room for improvement.

The data we have are already showing improvement in our conversion rates for several languages while also showing a better understanding of the things we ask our users to do to validate their process.

So in short: Put efforts into your translations and work with independent translators, you have a lot to win.