# Context

Localization is often an afterthought in product design, but it shouldn't be. When done right, it can transform a product from a simple translation of words to a fully immersive and culturally relevant experience for users across the globe. In a relevant episode of The Agile Localization Podcast, host Stefan Huyghe sat down with Willian Magalhães, a Senior Content Designer and UX Writer, to dive into the intersection of UX writing and localization. Willian reveals the biggest challenges in designing multilingual experiences, how localization impacts user engagement, retention, and business growth, and why breaking down silos between teams is crucial.

We often emphasize the importance of providing context for translators. The more context you provide, the better translation quality you can get. This is especially important when it comes to web or mobile applications. Since texts for app translation are typically short, context would help translators decide which translation variant should be used. With Crowdin, you can provide translation context in multiple ways. It can either be a textual context for every key or an in-context preview to let translators browse the web app while translating. A manager in a Crowdin project can add screenshots, so translators can see exactly how the key would be used in the app. Let’s stop on the screenshots, they are great but might be hard to add for every key and maintain them relevant as your project evolves. One of our customers – Bounce, recently implemented a great solution for managing project screenshots. The amount of screenshots they manage is huge! Bounce project has 8000 screenshots in Crowdin, covering a big part of their product – a mobile app for luggage storage and pickup and their email templates. These screenshots are being updated as the product evolves. No manual work, the whole process is automated. How can that be possible? Let’s figure it out.

The key idea behind developing Crowdin Mobile SDK was to help you make the apps you build accessible to global customers faster, keeping your data secure, and ensuring the high quality of translation. Hence, Over-the-Air Content Delivery allows you to update the translated strings of the iOS and Android apps instantly. Without submitting a new app version on the App Store or Google Play each time new translations arrive. Along with CDN, Crowdin Mobile SDK allows you to set up two additional features. Both Screenshots and Real-Time Preview are not aimed at your end-users but will help to give translators functional and visual context. Learn how you can integrate SDK extras in your app localization workflow and get better translations.

Software translations are often full of all sorts of mistakes. If you are speaking another language besides English, you have probably rolled your eyes at a weird or out-of-place text in an app at some point. "Oh no, couldn't they have found proper translators?" you might have thought to yourself. The thing is, the app's creators probably did find the specialists. And the problem is not that they are using just machine translation results without human edits. The problem is the lack of context. Having context is important to provide accurate translations. When it comes to UI, tackling the text without one might become especially challenging. It only seems that it might be easier because often the text is quite short. But without context in translation, this shortness makes it even tougher. How do translators know whether in this particular place 'Home' refers to the main navigation menu, a user’s physical residence, or perhaps the starting point of a process? A word without a context can be anything.

The more people are translating your project, the less time it takes to receive results, no one can doubt that. But there’s no guarantee that translations made by several people will be consistent in tone of voice, wording, and terminology usage. A glossary is one of the resources that should be added to help your translators understand the key terminology and how it should be translated. In this article, we’ll show you how a termbase can improve your software localization process, then explain how to build and translate a glossary. Storing your glossary in your translation management system (TMS) is a great way to enhance collaboration between everyone involved in the project.

Did you know that simply great translations might not always be the same as relevant to your app translations? Accurate translations depend on many factors such as translation context, the translation team you choose, quality of the source strings, and many other things. Companies usually concentrate on the translation team and often overlook the importance of providing translation context. Which tends to result in poor quality translations or the ones that aren’t relevant to your app.