31 hours of work saved monthly: Babbel's translation transformation with Smartcat

Theresa Hein, content strategy and localization lead, and Chiara Zannoni, localization manager for the marketing team, sat down with Smartcat’s head of content, Loie Favre, to discuss how their translation projects have progressed since starting to use Smartcat in October 2022.

With the marketing and product departments being their two biggest internal clients, the localization team is responsible for localizing a range of content types:

• Blog articles

• All paid and organic marketing assets

• CRM (a big part of their content)

• Surveys for the market research and UX teams

• Product user interface

• Multimedia including video, YouTube, subtitles, and scripts

To begin, they discussed some of the issues they had been facing prior to starting with Smartcat.

Prior to switching to Smartcat, their translation process was spread across a few platforms and it involved a lot of manual work, such as copying and pasting between apps. They stored articles as Google Documents and needed to manually download source texts from WordPress and then upload them back again. For each translation request, they needed to create a ticket on ClickUp (a project management tool not made for localization).

Sourcing proficient vendors to handle Babbel's increasing range of required translated languages proved time-consuming. 

The team dedicated significant time to scouring various platforms (LinkedIn and personal networks) in search of suitable suppliers, gathering relevant details, engaging in negotiations to establish terms and rates, conducting tests, and facilitating the onboarding process, primarily relying on email communication. 

Furthermore, the team encountered particular challenges in finding vendors who were proficient in rare language combinations.

Babbel had a pool of around 50 freelance vendors. Every month, they needed to process between 20 and 30 invoices, which the accounting department paid out. They tracked everything in spreadsheets, including tasks, word counts, service types, and final prices.

When linguists submitted invoices, the localization team would need to manually cross-check these against spreadsheets. Sometimes, the accounting team would find errors, resulting in the localization team having to contact linguists via email to request fixes.

In addition to sourcing and paying, Theresa and Chiara’s team carried out the entire project management side of localization via multiple platforms. One of these was email, where a lot of time was spent discussing vendor availability, exchanging files, and hearing about completed tasks, with no way to see the progress external vendors were making in real time.

Babbel’s localization team decided they needed a more streamlined and centralized approach to translation and localization that would eliminate manual steps like copying and pasting between platforms, lengthy vendor sourcing, and payments.

Smartcat created a custom WordPress connector for Babbel, which is now a widely used and popular Plug&Play integration available for all Smartcat users.

The magazine is a culture and language-centered blog aimed to inspire, help, and educate Babbel language learners.

1. Content is pulled from WordPress automatically.

The Smartcat WordPress connector instantly pulls source texts from the WordPress content management system (CMS) and into a translation project on the Smartcat AI platform. Translations can be requested right from WordPress as well.

2. An AI translation is produced in the Smartcat TMS, which is built for ease, collaboration, and high quality. Then expert reviewers do a quality check where needed. All approved translations are saved in a Translation Memory.

The AI translation is checked by vetted reviewers from Babbel’s freelancer pool or the Smartcat Marketplace. These reviewers work collaboratively with Babbel’s localization and editor teams in the Smartcat Editor. External reviewers check the AI translation, and the in-house team approves their work. 

3. The translated content is pulled back into the WordPress CMS and localized versions of the site.

When the translation task is approved, the translations are automatically pulled back into the localized versions of the WordPress website. This creates a continuous localization process that requires absolutely no copying and pasting.

Local Babbel editors take care of any further formatting required in WordPress, and they’re finding the new integration very helpful.

The Google Sheets integration helped the Babbel team create a continuous translation workflow when it came to localizing their marketing copy. It meant they could work in their usual digital environment, i.e., adding copy in the sheets that are required for web pages, digital ads, visual assets, videos, and more.

The Google Sheets integration pulls the source text from the spreadsheets into Smartcat, where it’s AI translated and then checked, where necessary, by reviewers who specialize in marketing. Finally, the system pulls the engaging and click-worthy localized content back into the corresponding language columns.

Smartcat AI Actions uses contextual enhancements to produce translations and learn your brand tone, voice, and specific terminology. Smartcat also ensures robust security measures to protect user data, and encrypts and stores data in secure data centers across different locations, adhering to strict compliance regulations. Data are never used for training generative AI.

Localization manager, Chiara, also now uses Smartcat enterprise-compliant procurement solution to source suppliers. She uses the AI sourcing functionality that matches reviewer language pairs, specialization, availability, rates, and reviews against the company’s content and project needs.

Furthermore, the team also has access to the Smartcat Marketplace database of 500,000 vetted linguists.

“With the Smartcat Marketplace, we could cover more languages than before and have a lot of flexibility, especially when looking up uncommon language combinations for our magazine.”

“With the Smartcat Marketplace, we could cover more languages than before and have a lot of flexibility, especially when looking up uncommon language combinations for our magazine.”

With Smartcat, Babbel can now hire and pay all reviewers under one agreement and one invoice. All the ongoing tasks and completed jobs can be viewed on a centralized page on the platform that’s updated in real-time, leaving no room for error or misunderstanding.

The localization team knew it was important for their business unit to calculate and measure translation and localization KPIs as a means to show the progress made in the past year.

• 7 hours saved thanks to WordPress connector

• 4 hours saved in invoicing process

• 18 hours saved by avoiding manual translation assignments

• 2 hours saved sourcing linguists

• 95% timely delivery

With quality, cultural appropriateness, and customer centricity being at the core of Babbel’s company culture, the localization team took these values to heart to actively elevate the company’s translation and localization processes. By using the holistic, all-in-one Smartcat enterprise language AI platform, they were able to improve workflow efficiencies and get more multilingual content in less time.

Babbel’s localization team has also managed to knock their quality metrics out of the park as a result of their defined translation and quality control procedures: 100% quality content delivered to internal stakeholders.

Babbel will continue to use Smartcat AI to manage its multilingual marketing and sales materials. The product team has confirmed that they are in the process of migrating to Smartcat as their primary tool to localize the user interface of the Babbel learning platform.