December 2013 – Get Localization Blog

Today we got the chance to talk with Fiverr‘s Oren Ben-Ami about how they handle localization.

Q1. Tell us about Fiverr!

Fiverr is world’s largest marketplace for services, starting at $5. For example, if you are launching a website for a small business, you can go to Fiverr and order services to help grow your business, such as website creation and design, logo design, or even a video testimonial. The Fiverr community of buyers and sellers is far-reaching and diverse, including everyone from college students to professionals and housewives to senior citizens. On our site, you can find over three million services offered (known as Gigs®). Fiverr is a privately held company founded in 2010 with headquarters based in New York. I am part of the amazing Product team based in Israel.

Q2. Please tell us about yourself.

I came to Fiverr from MediaMind where I managed the localization process for our web-based platform (for Japanese and Spanish). At Fiverr, I assumed the role of Localization Manager and am responsible for the localization of the Fiverr.com site. My position at Fiverr is much more challenging, since it’s not just the user interface that is translated, rather, it’s supporting user generated content in various languages.

Q3. How are you using Get Localization?

Fiverr is split up into two areas, the user interface and user generated
content.

The user interface uses external files to display all the content on the site. The majority of the files we use are called YAML files (with the .yml extension). We also have a few JavaScript files (with the .js extension). First, it was my responsibility to validate all the English texts in those files. Once I felt comfortable with the English, I upload all the files to the Get Localization platform. Since we have a very large seller-based community, our co-founders Shai Wininger and Micha Kaufman suggested to have our own community translate the site. It’s in our seller’s interest to participate in this project as it can increase their offering to a wider audience.
The user content is the actual services that sellers offer. Once the user interface was translated, the sellers just follow the instructions in their language and create the service that they want to offer. Currently, we translated one language and are working on a few others.

Before we start with our next language, we want to integrate with
Get Localization’s API to make the process more automated.

Q4. Would you have localization tips or best practices that you would like
to share?

One of the most important tips is to make sure the English is written correctly in your files before you upload to Get Localization for the translators. Also, you should use the comment area within Get Localization for certain strings. For example, we had some strings that needed an explanation for context, so users know how to translate. We also have some texts that we want to leave in English or that we want to change just for a specific language. The comment area is very good for these types of issues. It’s also a good idea to have someone validate the translations. We were lucky enough to have some Fiverr employees join our Get Localization project and either translate texts or validate existing texts. The advantage that the Fiverr employees have is that they can sit with me and see the context of the translations and we can change it instantly.