Featured Customer
Internationalizing the World’s Work Marketplace
Founded: 2013
Industry: Freelance Marketplace
Employees: 5,661 (2021)
Countries: 190
Situation
As of 2020, the Upwork platform was already being accessed from 130 countries, but all access was in English. To increase market penetration, Upwork decided to make the platform available in local languages in 2021. The decision posed a challenge for development leadership, as the software code had never been internationalized, and their teams were new to i18n. Upwork approached Lingoport for a solution to localize the platform while keeping their feature roadmap intact.
Challenges
- Upwork had over 100 dev teams
- The underlying software codebase was huge, 300 projects, and 100s of repositories.
- The codebase consisted of legacy code from prior companies, as well as new code that was continually being developed with agile processes.
- Multitude of technologies used in the code including Vue, Node, Javascript, Java, PHP, HTML, YAML
- Dev teams were too busy building the code, which made it difficult to get them to focus on i18n issues
Solution
Lingoport provided a dedicated of i18n architects, developers, and QA resources.
Using Globalyzer the team analyzed the organization’s i18n gaps. i18n issues were grouped by type and per repository.
The Lingoport team delivered the missing i18n frame-works and began i18n refactoring coding work.
QA specialist wrote i18n-specific unit tests for Upwork QA team to utilize for each module delivered.
DB experts analyzed, and provided documented i18n remediation design options.
All process were documented in i18n Coding Guidelines which provided code-level examples of how to refactor source code for Upwork-specific development environment and coding practices.
Lingoport ran training sessions for Upwork developers and team leads.
Team managers could see the i18n remediation progress via Globalyzer’s dashboards.
Lingoport integrated Localyzer with i18n’ed repos and databases to enable sending of translatable content to localization and perform testing with pseudo-localized or machine-translated content.
Globalyzer has been at the core of our success and has helped us not only with i18n refactoring but also provided the visibility we needed to manage the i18n project at the company level.” “It’s been great working with you, Lingoport. You have taken on a complex situation and paved the way for us. Today we are able to proceed with our software i18n efforts on our own and are on plan to start localization for our first set of target locales.”
Results
Upwork received the i18n know-how and tools that provide quality, efficiency, automation, and visibility in their globalization efforts.
Each Upwork dev team has been burning down their remaining issues on their own with their i18n-trained workforce.
Training session changed the developers mindset on i18n compliance as they coded.
The Globalyzer and Localyzer technologies improved automation and QA checks to speed up the localization readiness of Upwork.
