Transifex helps you manage translations of your apps, websites, documents, and more.
After you sign up for a Transifex account, you'll be asked to create an organization. This organization will be the home for all the projects you'll translate with Transifex and the people involved in the process. As the person who created the organization, you'll be designated one of its Administrators.
📝 Note: Only one organization per user is allowed. If you would like to create a new organization with the same username, please get in touch with us.
Each Transifex organization is organized around projects and resources. Before diving into how you can create a project or add content for translation, let's discuss what resources and projects are.
Resources are content you're translating along with their corresponding translations. Let's say you're translating a file named file.po (the source file) from English into French and German. When you upload file.po to Transifex, Transifex will automatically create two new files for you – file_fr.po and file_de.po. These new translation files will hold your French and German translations, respectively. Together, the three files form a single resource in Transifex.
Once you understand what resources are, it's easy to understand Projects. Projects are simply a collection of resources. You can create as many projects as you need, and there's no limit to how many resources can be in a project.
Organizing projects and resources
Projects can be organized in any way you like. Think about the projects as directories and resources as files. Here are a few things to keep in mind:
It's best to group related content into a single project. For example, one project for your iOS app and another for your website. Each project has specific settings and configuration options (e.g., translation team, translation memory, workflow settings).
Each project is translated into one or more languages (target languages). If you have content that needs to be translated into separate sets of languages, create separate projects for them. Suppose you want content in the same project that needs to be translated into different languages. In that case, you'll need to tell your translators to remember not to translate those files into some of the project's languages.
Each project is also assigned to a team of translators and reviewers. If you have two resources that you wish to be translated by two different teams, put them into separate projects.
If you are using files, one file is associated with one resource. In some instances, you might have thousands of phrases in your database, which can be grouped in different ways into resources. Here, it's really up to you: you can have one big resource or multiple smaller ones:
One big resource will make it easier for translators to go over the phrases.
Multiple smaller ones allow you to group your phrases further logically and have multiple instances of the same phrase that may need to be translated differently, etc.
Here's an example structure that can help illustrate some of these ideas.
Project: Documentation
Resource: FAQ
Resource: About
Resource: Introduction
Project: Android app
Resource: UI labels specific to customer X
Resource: Translations of city names showing in the app
Resource: UI phrases
Project: User-generated content
Resource: Customized menu label
Resource: User Comments
Resource: Product Reviews
In the above example, you could also argue that the resource type "UI labels specific to customer X" might be better grouped on a separate project so they're all together. It's really up to you. You can leave it under the same project if you have just 1-2 customers. If you have 100 customers, put it under a separate project. If the number of labels per customer is just a couple, instead of having 100 resources of 2 phrases, you should have just one resource with 200 phrases and use tags to distinguish each customer.
Source and target file formats
Resources are files you're translating along with their corresponding translations. Let's say you're translating a file named file.po (the source file) from English into French and German (translation files). When you upload file.po to Transifex, Transifex will automatically create two new files for you – file_fr.po and file_de.po. These new translation files will hold your French and German translations, respectively.
Converting File Formats
Please note that Transifex does not change or convert the source file format but keeps the same file format and structure. For example, If you upload a .po file in English, you’ll get the .po file in French and German.
The only case when it is possible to get another file format is .xliff (This feature is available on the Premium plan and up). This option uses .xliff as an intermediary file format for translating outside Transifex in another CAT tool. XLIFF file is an XML-based format created to standardize how localizable data are passed between tools during a localization process and is a common format for CAT tool exchange.
In this case, the workflow is:
Upload your source file in your desired file format, e.g., .po.
Download the file for translation as xliff
Translate XLIFF outside of Transifex
Upload the XLIFF file back to Transifex (using the option “Upload XLIFF file").
The translation is now back in Transifex so that you can download the translated file in the original .po file format.
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