ePlaneAI is an online aviation marketplace that uses AI to connect buyers and sellers. In 2022, Angel Marinov had an idea to help renovate the platform and open it up for use in new international markets.
Idealogic, a software development and consulting company, helped ePlaneAI create an integrated, secure, and user-friendly marketplace that caters to the global aerospace community. Due to the international vision for the company, translation of its online app was vital to its future success. ePlaneAI wanted to reach new target audiences in Europe and Asia, but securing the resources and budget was in question.
Challenge
Prior to this initiative, the ePlaneAI app was only available in English and Simplified Chinese. The Chinese version had been translated manually and deployed as an entirely separate version of the app, which was a large engineering burden. In addition, the translations had not been updated in several years, meaning that user experience varied for users around the globe.
To deploy additional languages using this same approach would have been an enormous undertaking with thousands of hours of manual work for both the engineering team and translators. Oleh Henaliuk, responsible for the ePlaneAI website development, estimated that the set-up alone would have taken two full-time engineers two to three months to complete.
Oleh said of their original process, “To manage translations on our side, we would have had to implement new data structures, manually take the content to a translation agency, and then manually input the data back into our system. That would be too much work when the team needs to be focused on core system features development.”
Solution
ePlaneAI wanted an automated solution that would allow them to scale into any language without the need to manage translations internally. They turned to Smartling’s Global Delivery Network (GDN) to do just that.
The GDN translation proxy immediately resolved many of the manual challenges facing the ePlaneAI team. Once configured, their app content could flow automatically into Smartling for machine or human translation. When content changed on the English app, it was automatically flagged and surfaced in the Smartling platform for review. This system has allowed the ePlaneAI team to treat localization as a maintenance task, taking no more than 15-30 minutes out of their day. They have been able to reinvest more than 2,800 hours of engineering work that would have been spent on localization back into core platform development.
Most importantly, using a translation proxy means that ePlaneAI can provide users with content in their native language without having to develop and manage multiple versions of the same app. When a user selects a non-English language, the app content is automatically replaced with a translated version. All of this happens instantly, giving international users an experience consistent with a standalone, translated app but without all the overhead.
With the help of Smartling, ePlaneAI has made their web app available in eleven different languages. ePlaneAI have now set their sights on expanding localization to even more of their content to deliver robust customer experiences for users around the globe.
