In this article, we will dive into how to create, assign, and manage tasks, as well as expertly use projects, tags, categories, discussions, and announcements. By the end, you will be able to define tasks, set deadlines, and track progress in multiple ways.
Common setup
Regardless of how you choose to allocate tasks, some common setup steps are needed to get the most out of Transifex's task management features.
Setting up Teams and inviting collaborators
1. Create a Team
Create a Team from the Teams Page by following the instructions indicated here. Note: A team represents a translation team or possibly a vendor. Therefore, a team can be assigned to one or multiple projects. Whether you add tasks via project, resource, or string, your security model will revolve around teams and, therefore, projects.
2. Invite Team Managers
Each team will have at least one Team Manager who will invite translators, reviewers, and language coordinators to specific translation team(s). If you would like to invite Team Managers to a team, please follow the instructions included here.
3. Invite Project Maintainers
Each project will have at least one Project Maintainer (Localization Manager) who will update and add resources to be localized. To invite Project Maintainers, please follow the instructions indicated here.
Task management
📝 Note: Task management is only available on the Growth plan and up.
Managing tasks with Transifex is extremely easy and straightforward. You can easily create tasks, break them down into subtasks, assign them to specific teams and collaborators, easily manage them all, and track their progress from a single page.
Below, we'll go over a workflow you can follow to get the most out of this feature.
Task management workflow
1. Creating a task
The first step in our workflow is to create a task. Creating a task is done from within the editor by selecting the strings you want to include and clicking Create task.
📝 Note: Creating a task can only be done by Organization Administrators and Project Maintainers.
This will open the task wizard, where you can define the parameters of your project, such as name, description, priority, and task type.
The task type will dictate the types of subtasks that you can break your main task into. For example, if you select the Proofread task type, you can also break your task into Translation and Review subtasks.
Creating a Task will notify Team Managers and Language Coordinators so they can get together with their teams and begin their work.
📝 Note: If the strings you have selected have already reached their final status, they will not be included in the task.
2. Setting deadlines for tasks and subtasks
After we've set up our Task details and selected the task type, the next step is to set deadlines for either the entirety of the task or have a different due date for each subtask. Due dates can help organize the efforts of different teams, and any collaborator assigned to an incomplete task or substack will receive reminders when a deadline is close.
3. Selecting Languages
Next, you will select your target languages for this task, which will provide a breakdown of the word count of each language. A total word count is also provided and is dynamically updated whenever you change your language selection.
💡Tip: You can find more information about creating tasks here.
4. Assigning collaborators
When assigning collaborators, you have two options:
Automatic assignment: This option will assign a task to all collaborators with access to the project.
Manual assignment: With this option, you can manually select individual collaborators with access to the project and assign them to work on the task.
Assigning collaborators can either be done while setting up the task through the wizard or later by visiting the Tasks page.
When a collaborator is assigned to a task, they will get notified and can start working on it. If there are subtasks, i.e., a Translation and a Review subtask, the reviewers will receive a notification once the Translation step is 100% complete, and they can start reviewing.
💡Tip: You can learn more about assigning tasks and collaborators here.
5. Managing your tasks and tracking their progress
Visiting the Tasks page also allows you to make changes to the details of a Task, such as changing the name, description, priority, or due dates. From here, you can mark a task as done, reopen completed tasks, and delete tasks.
This page also gives you an at-a-glance overview of the state of your tasks, and you can also expand each task to view the same details for each subtask.
6. Task completion
Once a task is 100% complete, the creator will be notified, and they can go ahead and mark the task as done.
💡Tip: You can find more information on managing tasks and their notifications in this article.
Alternative ways of managing tasks
While Tasks are a streamlined and versatile way to assign work to your collaborators, Transifex offers a variety of tools in addition to them, which you can utilize to customize your workflows even more.
Defining tasks on a Project Level
Let's say, for example, that your organization had three major applications: A front-end facing Web Application, a Help Desk Centre, and Marketing Materials. If each one of these applications uses a different translation vendor (or internal vendor) or is maintained by a different individual, then you would want to segment each application into its own project.
Please follow the instructions below to assign tasks based on projects properly.
File-Based: Workflow when deadlines are set on a Project level
1. Adding new content
When new content is added to the project, Transifex sends an e-mail notification to users like language coordinators, reviewers, and translators. To receive notifications when existing content is modified, users must enable watch notifications.
Once such a notification is received, translators can log into Transifex and use the link in the e-mail notification to start working on the newly introduced content and deliver translations.
2. Conveying deadlines
Deadlines can be conveyed via an announcement that all translators who are project members can see.
3. What happens when translations are 100% complete
When the translation for any resource-language pair is 100% complete, a notification is sent to the Project Maintainer. The Project Maintainer has the following options to notify the review staff:
If the Project Maintainer is assigned as a Team Manager, he can notify reviewers of a particular language. To do this, create a discussion directed to collaborators of a specific language (a message can be sent on a team or language group level).
Notify individual reviewers. To do this, send messages to one or multiple reviewers within Transifex.
Notify all collaborators for a particular project. To do this, create an announcement.
Reviewers can also be notified via Slack notifications as described here.
These announcements, messages, or discussions are received via e-mail or can be seen in the Transifex notifications window, except for Slack notifications, where they can be seen in Slack directly.
4. What happens when translations are 100% reviewed
Automate the localization process as much as you can by creating a webhook. When all of your strings have been reviewed, Transifex will ping you back (using a webhook) to let you know that you are ready to download the translations and deploy.
You will need a web server to listen to the webhook calls and some kind of application to react to those. Your engineers will get notified about this, and they can use the web hook's response to automatically pull the completed translations from Transifex and deploy them.
Transifex Live: Workflow when deadlines are set on a Project Level
Adding new content
When Transifex Live detects new content, Transifex sends an e-mail notification to the project maintainers. This notification is sent 8 hours after a string is detected. The project maintainer then approves the new strings and ignores those no longer in use (not on any page). Once the approval process is done, then watchers are notified.
Users need to enable watch notifications to be sent for resource updates. Please note that in Live, notifications are sent via e-mail within an hour of the change.
📝 Note: The rest of the steps are the same as the ones described in the File-based projects above.
How to ensure deadlines are met on a Project level
Multiple tools can be used to track Translation progress and to see if deadlines are being met.
1. Progress Reports. These reports display the completion rates of projects, resources, and languages. These reports can be downloaded in .csv format and displayed in a spreadsheet where they can be easily matched to deadlines.
2. Translation Activity Reports. These reports track the progress of individual translators.
3. The Project Dashboard can also be used for tracking progress.
4. For users of Slack, a progress report can also be seen in Slack using the following slash command: /tx stats <project_name> as explained here.
Defining tasks on a Resource level
Transifex offers the concept of a category to assign work on a resource level. A user can categorize resources and assign a particular category to a resource. A localization manager can then assign a translator to a specific category. Please note that categories can also be assigned for multiple resources simultaneously via the API.
Follow the instructions below to assign tasks based on resources and categories quickly and efficiently.
File-Based: Workflow when deadlines are set on a Resource Level
1. Adding new content
When new content is added to the project, Transifex sends an e-mail notification to users like language coordinators, reviewers, and translators. To receive notifications when existing content is modified, users must enable watch notifications.
Once such a notification is received, translators can log into Transifex and use the link in the e-mail notification to check if resources are assigned to them.
A new or existing resource can be tagged with a specific category, such as a product name, a feature, a translator name, etc. More than one category can be assigned to a single resource so, for example, if you want some of your resources belonging to the category core-product to be translated by Translator A, then you can use the following categories to help your translator easily find the resources they need to work on.
The categories are exposed on a resource level and can be filtered by the user.
2. Conveying Deadlines
Deadlines can also be conveyed as category names. Resources with a higher priority can also be prioritized as described here.
3. What happens when translations are 100% complete
You have the same options as those described for tasks at the project level.
4. What happens when translations are 100% reviewed
You have the same options as those described for tasks at the project level.
Transifex Live: Workflow When Deadlines are Set on a Resource Level
Differences between Live and File-Based Projects
The only difference is in the notification process. When Transifex Live detects new content, Transifex sends an e-mail notification to the project maintainers. As mentioned above, this notification is sent 8 hours after a string is detected. The project maintainer then approves the new strings and ignores those no longer in use (not on any page). Once the approval process is done, then watchers are notified.
Users need to enable watch notifications to be sent for resource updates. Please note that in Live, notifications are sent via e-mail to collaborators within an hour of the change.
How to ensure deadlines are met on a Resource level
The easiest way to track progress on a resource level is through the Transifex resources interface. Select the project from the left-hand side menu and then select resources. From the category drop-down list, select the category and track the progress directly from the application itself, as can be seen below:
To see the progress by language, drill down by clicking on the resource name.
Progress Reports. These reports display the completion rates of projects, resources, and languages. These reports can be downloaded in .csv format and displayed in a spreadsheet where they can be easily matched to deadlines.
For users of Slack, a progress report can also be seen in Slack using the following slash command: /tx stats <project_name> <resource_name> as explained here.
Defining tasks on a string level
Allocating work on a string level requires that one tags strings.
File-Based: Workflow When Deadlines are Set on a String Level
1. Assigning Tasks To Translators
Example A
Translator A is expected to translate the first 100 strings, and Translator B is expected to work on the following 100 strings. To assign these tasks to them, follow the steps below:
Enter the editor where the strings of a single resource or all resources (to add tags to multiple strings across resources in a given project, then make sure to show all resources in the editor) of the project are displayed.
Select the first string, scroll to the 100th string, and select the 100th string while pressing shift. As a result, the first 100 strings will be selected at once, and then you can assign a tag such as TranslatorA to all of them via editor bulk actions. Do the same for the following 100 strings, assigning the tag TranslatorB instead.
Example B
Translator A is expected to work on strings added to Transifex after August 1, 2020, and their keys contain the word "homepage". To properly tag these strings, you must apply the filters source_updated_after:2020-08-01 and key:homepage. Once results are returned, select them all, and through editor bulk actions, assign the tag TranslatorA to all these strings at once.
Translator B is expected to work on strings that include string instructions with the text "blog post text" and have open issues. To properly tag these strings, you must apply the filters: instructions:'blog post text' and issue:open. Once results are returned, select them all, and through editor bulk actions, assign the tag Translator B to all these strings at once.
To inform collaborators about what their work assignments are, after filtering the strings based on the assigned tags, a dedicated URL is generated by Transifex, which can be shared through an announcement or discussion (if these tasks are referring to a specific target language) - you need to copy the URL from the browser address bar.
2. Conveying deadlines
Deadlines can be conveyed as tags as well. For example, if the deadline for a group of strings is June 30, 2020, bulk select the desired strings and assign a tag such as 06-30-2020.
3. What happens when translations are 100% complete
The translator can send a message to the project maintainer when translations are completed.
The Project Maintainer has the following options to notify the review staff:
Notify reviewers of a particular language. To do this, create a discussion directed to collaborators of a specific language(a message sent on a language group level).
Notify individual reviewers. To do this, send messages to one or multiple reviewers within Transifex.
Notify all collaborators for a particular project. To do this, create an announcement.
Trigger a webhook when a string or a set of strings with a specific tag is finished translating.
These announcements, messages, or discussions are received via e-mail or can be seen in the Transifex notifications window.
In all cases, the instructions can contain a hyperlink that includes a link to the specific tags (to do this, add the tag as a filter in the translation editor and copy the URL from the browser address bar).
4. What happens when translations are 100% reviewed
Reviewers can message the project maintainer when they complete their work.
Transifex Live: Workflow when deadlines are set on a string Level
Differences between Live and File-Based Projects
In addition to tagging strings through the editor directly, by using Transifex Live, developers can assign tags to individual strings directly in their HTML by following the instructions here.
How to ensure deadlines are met on a string Level
The easiest way to track translation progress is by using Filters in the translation area. One can inspect the progress using the 'tags' filter and the 'Status' filter to find all untranslated strings belonging to a particular order, deadline, etc.
To simultaneously track progress on all resources in a given project, select all resources before entering the editor.
A report can be built that displays the progress by tag using the API with the following call.
💡Tip
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