Storyblok & Lingohub: Organize your content for the multilingual world
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How Storyblok scaled up their localization efforts thanks to Lingohub
Storyblok is the only headless CMS with a visual editor. Started in 2015, it quickly became adopted by developers from around the world as their preferred content management solution. Today it is used by large enterprises and small companies alike.
In today's Global Champion series, Storyblok co-founders Dominik Angerer and Alexander Feiglstorfer gave us a glimpse inside Storyblok and how Lingohub helped them scale up the initial translation of the Storyblok application.
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The first Storyblok prototype saw the light of day back in 2015. What was your initial motivation behind the idea?
We started working on the prototype after evaluating existing solutions like Adobe Experience Manager, Sitecore, and other headless options for the agency we were working with.
Sadly none of them had the API-based approach combined with an editor experience that you can hand off to a marketer that would enable them to organize their content. So we had to do something.
Can you give us some insights into the challenges and benefits of creating a software for developers?
The biggest challenge to this date is documentation and onboarding, both are crucial, and even today, we are trying to improve it day by day.
Writing about features, functionalities, concepts, or even just a changelog entry includes information about our product that needs to be updated and created.
Storyblok is the only headless CMS with a visual editor, which gives a lot of independence both to the developer and content creators.
An API-based CMS is not for everybody and may not be the fastest thing you can set up. However, many drawbacks come with a traditional CMS. To learn more about headless CMS and its benefits, make sure to check out our article here.
Can you give us some insights on how your customers can localize their websites & apps?
We offer our customers two solutions for localization. The first option is through a single content tree that stores several translations as a property.
The second option uses separate content trees, one for each language.
We started Storyblok with an exact idea for those two versions of localization, which benefits many international brands and smaller marketing teams.
Suppose you're a brand that addresses multiple markets with different teams. Each of them develops a different go-to-market strategy. You can not rely on a basic translation setup where you might only translate one field.
In that case, you will need a system that allows you to create completely separate content trees for each market as you need to address each individually.
With Storyblok, you can do both – you can create a marketing-centric blog or press area that is created for all of your brands, and you only translate the textual content.
When it comes to promotions that you might want to run in specific countries, you can do that using the folder approach.
Having an internationalization strategy early on was really important for us.
Speaking of localization, how did your localization process look like before switching to Lingohub? What value do you believe using Lingohub brings to your team and your users?
So at Storyblok, we were looking for a fast way to translate our application itself into different languages. And we've asked our community which languages they want us to translate it to.
We've then exported all those labels and strings into a JSON file and published them on GitHub for everybody to see. We've thought about getting in touch with translation agencies, but those were not really capable of using the JSON structure we provided. Therefore we were looking for a solution that would help us scale with more translation from the same source, and that's where we found Lingohub.
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With Lingohub, we were able to import our source file and choose the languages we want it to be translated. Once it's finished, we push it onto our content repository and then dynamically include it in our interface for our customers to choose new language translations.
Today, Storyblok supports any language that you might want to use. If there is one missing in our default list, you can customize the locale to fit your needs.
And with the help of Lingohub, the Storyblok web interface itself is now available in 8 languages.
Now over to you
To learn more about Storyblok, go check out their headless CMS right here. To learn more about Lingohub and how it could also help you in your localization & translation efforts, make sure to give it a free try right here. Also contact us for a personal demo.