Jennifer Chew
Product Marketing ManagerSmartling
The largest, fastest growing global sport streaming service, DAZN is a British tech start-up that gives sports fans around the world access to sports anytime, anywhere. Since launching in 2016, DAZN has grown to a global workforce of over 2,800 and offers their streaming service in nine countries: Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Japan, Italy, Spain, Brazil, Canada, and the U.S.
With their target audiences spanning across the globe, DAZN recognised the value of localisation early on. “When you’re trying to make a product appealing to customers one of the things they want is simplicity”, says Isabel Teodoro, Localisation Manager at DAZN. “Use of the local language can be helpful.”
DAZN recognises that localisation involves more than just translating sentences. It involves managing the entire process of getting content over to a team of translators and coordinating the translation production flow from start to finish, as well as localising distribution, payment methods, legal and compliance and the wider customer experience.
After several localisation launches, it was time to change their process and DAZN began looking for a translation technology solution to complete translations in a more efficient, organised way.
The Challenge:
- A highly manual process - The legacy approach was labour intensive, involving copying and pasting from different content systems and emailing Excel spreadsheets back and forth with translators: “For each translation, I had to email five people - one for each language. Then once I got the translation back, I emailed five different people for review”, said Isabel Teodoro, Localisation Manager at DAZN. Multiply that across different languages, content types, and departments, and it took over 150 emails to get a job done.
- Limited headcount to manage localisation - The team was stretched from dividing focus between two functions: 1) strategy, working with the Product and Marketing teams to incorporate localisation into their product launches (e.g. date formats, price formats, which languages to use based on business cases), and 2) operations, the day-to-day management of submitting and follow-up with translators and reviewers to get new translations.
- Duplication of work - With the same brand words and phrases being used across multiple pieces of content, there was a missed opportunity to reduce time and money spent on retranslating these words.
- Lack of visual context - With only Excel files of strings to reference, translators and reviewers had trouble understanding how translated text would appear in the published environment.
The Solution: Smartling
In their search, DAZN looked for a solution that included what they saw were the three pillars of a good translation management system (TMS): a strong integration (in this case, an API integration), process automation that was straightforward and easy to manage, and a CAT Tool that integrated with the TMS. Smartling fitted the bill and they onboarded in April 2018.
After adopting Smartling’s management technology, as well as Managed Services to help manage day-to-day operational tasks to set up the translation jobs, DAZN realised the following benefits:
- Automated the translation content flow with API-driven actions - Once translators had work in their hands, DAZN could trust Smartling’s workflows to take over. Smartling automatically notified editors and internal reviewers when their share of work was ready - and then pushed finalised translated content live.
- Maximised efficiency by 33% - By utilizing translation memory stored in the Smartling cloud, DAZN was able to reuse previous translations across their UI, as well as across their Help Centre pages. “If we didn’t use technology, we would be doing one-third of the work needlessly”, says Isabel. Translators could also concentrate on translating new content rather than spending time figuring out what they’ve already translated before and what’s actually new.
- Intuitive interface for translators and reviewers to complete their work - Visual context allowed DAZN’s team to evaluate translations quickly and accurately. Screenshots from their product UI and other content sources displaying alongside the translated strings, providing a clear view of how the translations would look in their published state. “With the click of a button, they can approve something right away”, says Isabel.
- Dedicated focus on crafting company strategy - Smartling Managed Services took over handling translation job creation and assignment to translators and tracking their progress. “Magdalena [my Managed Services contact] is a really big part of my team, as if she were sitting next to me”, says Isabel. With the help of Smartling Managed Services, the team was able to focus on building internal processes and alignment, and developed a coherent localisation strategy across departments for a rapidly growing company.
- One central localisation unit across the entire business - Smartling’s technology has provided DAZN with the infrastructure to centralise localisation requests across the company - whether from the product, marketing, or customer service teams. As a result, she has been able to bolster her efforts to create a coherent strategy and process to fulfil the entire company’s localisation needs.
Going forward, DAZN plans to launch their own CMS and integrate it directly with Smartling. Their technical teams building the in-house CMS are able to take DAZN’s localisation needs into consideration, placing translation as a central part of the overall content infrastructure.
