The spirit of sharing #️⃣
We are developers; we share our code on GitHub, GitLab, or elsewhere. We love to cooperate. We share our knowledge and build libraries for others to use. We have this in our DNA. It saves us time and money; it helps us to move forward faster and create better products.
Why don’t we share translations to make our content better for the worldwide audience? Why should we pay for translating the same words again and again? Does it make sense? It does not, and ShareTM is here to fix this issue.
Upload your strings and texts to Localazy and opt-in to instantly share your translations with other projects on the platform, and as a reward, get your strings translated to more languages.
ShareTM suggestions #️⃣
ShareTM works as an assistive translation memory. It helps your translators while they are translating your texts. It speeds up the process and empowers your translators with insight into the most common translations and how many other projects use them.
Both ShareTM and InTM suggesting translations:
How does it work? #️⃣
The basic idea is straightforward. When a translation is approved, it’s sent to ShareTM. And ShareTM distributes it across all other applicable projects on Localazy. It works exactly like this except that the actual process in the background is not that simple, and there are many quirks that we must handle correctly.
In a similar fashion, when a new string is added to Localazy - for example, if you import your strings in a new file - ShareTM learns about it and looks for all possible translations it can provide for it.
ShareTM vs. machine translation engines #️⃣
Google Translate and other machine translation tools provide a general translation. While they can perfectly translate regular texts, they struggle with short sentences or single words.
For example, in the Czech language, we usually use menu or nabídka as a translation for the English word menu (a very common word for software, apps and websites). However, Google Translate offers jídelní lístek, which is a list of meals in a restaurant. It sounds weird to us, and it’s an incorrect translation. Also it makes your project look silly.
ShareTM is, on the other hand, more likely to offer menu as a translation because it learns how other users translate it. ShareTM works with real life translations created by humans. The more projects there are on Localazy, the better suggestions ShareTM provides.
Machine translations are essential even for ShareTM - they provide additional context for reviewing translations and lead to improved quality of your translation.
Do I need to share everything? #️⃣
At Localazy, we can’t share everything as we are obligated to keep some of the mechanisms as a competitive advantage. We do a favor to those who support us on our mission.
That is a perfectly valid point for some of your strings too! URL addresses, ad and app identifiers, and other things are supposed to be private and to remain private. ShareTM can detect those strings and don’t process them - don’t share them with other apps and don’t even store and index them.
ShareTM vs. InTM #️⃣
You may or may not already notice that ShareTM is not our only little helper and that there is its close relative called InTM. How these two technologies that never sleep and work hard to improve the quality of translations differ is described in the What is Localazy InTM article.