Wordbee Flex is a technology and API to build continuous and string based translation workflows.
Wordbee Flex is perfect when the content you translate frequently changes over time. Strings may be added, removed, modified.
Flex lets you push/pull strings to/from Wordbee Translator. It literally mirrors your content inside a Wordbee Translator project. Translators or MT type the required translations and these are returned back into your systems. The great thing is that source and translated content can be updated both by your systems as well as in Wordbee Translator and even at the same time. Synchronization ensures the “mirror” stays accurate.
Use cases
Excellent use cases for Flex are:
Software localization
Games localization
Content management system localization
Database localization
Your data
Flex imposes very little constraints on your data and workflows. These constraints are:
You want to translate strings rather than files.
You assign unique IDs to your strings. This can be a number, a GUID, a database key, a file name or whatever you already use to identify your strings.
Your string content can be flat text or HTML
You may want to include meta data with each string or each language version of a string.
API integration
The minimum API required is:
Push content: An API method to submit a list of added, changed or removed strings to Wordbee Translator
Since each string comes with its ID, Flex automatically understands when it needs to add new strings or update existing strings.
Your payload can also optionally include all the translations or changes to translations in your systems. Flex will update translations in Wordbee Translator.
Pull content: An API method to retrieve strings and completed translations.
Each “push” is logged as a transaction in the system and you can discover transactions with the API. A transaction tells how many strings, words or characters in which languages were modified from your payload. It also includes information related to costing (if so configured by your Wordbee Translator team).
Wordbee Translator
All translation workflows happen in Wordbee Translator. You start with creating a project and adding a Flex container.
The Flex container will contain all the strings you push, will be populated with translations by the translation team or machine translation or both.
Each time you send some string updates (1 string, 100 strings or 1.000.000 strings at a time), a transaction is created in Wordbee Translator. Each transaction triggers the translation team to do their work.
Word counts and costing/invoices are established individually per transaction, and all automatic. Monthly invoices can be generated to pay your translators, revisers or other people involved.
You can create as many Flex containers you like. For example, one per software product, one for staging or testing etc.
Unique features
There are many exciting things about Flex. Let us summarize some:
Strings can be tagged as being flat text or HTML. When HTML, all the markup will automatically be protected against tampering by translators.
Strings and translations will be split into smaller sentences for the convenience of the translation team (and by default).
This often substantially enhances reuse of translations and helps to reduce translation cost.
The segmentation is “smart” and is maintained across all languages. For example, modifying the source text by inserting an extra sentence, will not break the current alignment of segments in the translation editor. In our example, it will insert a blank row at the location of the new sentence and keep the previous sentences perfectly aligned in all languages.
This is definitely not a common feature, see for yourself in other solutions! This feature helps to reduce cost significantly.
You can not just send source content updates to Flex but also:
Updates to translations in any language (maybe your systems allows to amend / fix translations occasionally and you need to get them to the translation team)
Think of a CMS: Maybe content editors occasionally correct some of the translated pages? Would it not be nice (or even mandatory) to get those over to the translation team to ensure the changes are registered for the next time?
You have full freedom to attach meta information and comments to each string or translation. There are different types of meta data:
Free text, Pick lists, Hyperlinks, Checkboxes etc.
On/Off and multi-value tags
Comments, individually per string or translation
Status information: Approved, not approved, etc.
Edit-lock strings/translations by the translation team. Maybe you need to freeze changes to batches of string such as during a release cycle.
With each string you can define in which ordinal position it shows up in the translation editor.
Ensure that strings show up in a specific sequence in the translation editor
You achieve this by including a “parent ID” with each string. For example string “B” might include instruction to come after string “A” and so on.
Transactional workflows ensure that you can push updates every 15 minutes without making the translation team go crazy or spamming people with thousands of micro-jobs.
You should be free to push as frequent as you like without “breaking” the translation team and workflows
Costing and invoicing
Word counting, costing and invoicing is per transaction. Supplier invoices can be aggregated on a monthly basis.
Simplicity
Flex truly is easy for the integrators and the translation teams. It has all the features you can imagine and imposes almost no constraints on the way YOU want to work.