👋 Introduction
ROUVY is a real and fun cycling experience that takes you around the world, from your home, in just a few clicks. It is a global indoor cycling platform for athletes where everybody can compete, ride with friends for fun, exercise and do much more.
Their indoor cycling platform includes 2000+ real routes synchronized with high-quality videos, workouts, group rides, competitions, and a complete indoor and outdoor training solution for tracking and analyzing training efforts.
In 2021, ROUVY asked us if we could help them build a localization workflow for their indoor cycling app that was quickly gaining global popularity. Later, ROUVY added their website to the localization mix to grow even faster and immensely helped us with the first iteration of the Strapi localization plugin that is now officially available for everyone.
ROUVY is one of the first customers who quickly realized the potential of the Localazy platform and managed to benefit fully from almost all the features Localazy can offer. ROUVY now utilizes Localazy for the continuous localization of their platform and content into multiple languages on an ongoing basis.
Lukáš TóthIn this interview, we asked Lukáš Tóth, the Product Manager at ROUVY, about their experience with Localazy.
🚵 The beginnings of ROUVY's localization journey
Hello! Can you please briefly introduce yourself to our readers?
Hi, I am Lukáš, and I have worked at ROUVY since 2017. I started as a Junior Product Manager, and I was in charge of introducing Localazy into our workflow back in 2021. Nowadays, our localization workflow is primarily automated, but I still keep in touch with the folks at Localazy whenever we need something (which is not very often 😅). Anyways, thank you for inviting me for the interview!
Let's start at the very beginning. What was the motivation for embarking on your localization journey back then?
ROUVY always had customers from around the world, so we knew we would need to translate our web and application into several languages to make ROUVY even more available for those unfamiliar with English. We have analyzed where most of our users are coming from and quickly decided which languages are the most important for us.
Did you have previous experience with localization?
Yes. We have been working mainly with the PO files translated by a translation agency. The experience wasn't very user-friendly and was a very time-demanding process. We had to export the files, send them to the translators, and let them do their job. After the translations were done, we had to upload them to the internal tools and wait for the release.
This sounds like a typical first experience that our users have before they switch to Localazy 😌 How did you find Localazy?
We have actually received a cold email from Localazy, and the proposition caught our interest. We didn’t even know there was a solution for software localization like Localazy on the market.
Who would have thought cold emailing still works? But I am sure glad it did in your case. Anyway, how did the process of integration with Localazy go?
We scheduled an initial call with Václav from Localazy, where he explained the platform and its benefits to our developers in more detail. We have added the task of implementing Localazy into one of the upcoming sprints and managed to get the initial integration up & running during the 14-day sprint without an issue. This was the case with our product - a multiplatform application for Android, iOS, Desktops, and even Apple TV.
Another team followed later, integrating our main website with Localazy in one sprint as well. We were also one of the first alpha testers of your Strapi plugin. Overall, the integration went smoothly, and adding new projects didn't take too much time.
Race & ride in real-time with other athletes.🌐 Falling in love with Localazy CDN
Do you remember what made your team go, “Localazy is the right choice; let’s do it”?
The most impactful moment was seeing the automation in action. We have set up our workflow in a way that developers don't have to deal with localization resources at all, thanks to the Localazy CDN, which significantly reduced the effort needed to release new versions. We didn't look back since.
You mentioned our CDN, so I quickly glanced over your stats, and I see that in 2022 the CDN has processed over 380M requests and delivered over 2.4 TB of localized data just for ROUVY.
Yes, that sounds about right, and this number should only grow. Localazy CDN is pretty comfortable for our users and developers because we don't have to update our application each time a new translation is available. An update is only needed when the source changes or new features are released.
But we don't use only the CDN. For example, our website has translations hosted on our servers, and we only download the changes when needed.
That makes sense because CDN pricing is usage-based, and delivering the translations to every website visitor would cost much more than servicing only your app users. Smart choice.
➡️ Learn more about Localazy CDNExplore, train, and compete with a global community behind you.
I know you translate a significant portion of your content with our Continuous Localization service. Do you have any in-house people dedicated to localization? Do you also pre-translate with MT, use releases, and so on?
Our workflow is quite linear. We don't need release tags and versioning for now, and we don't do pre-translation with MT. Once the content needs to be translated, it's uploaded to Localazy, where the Localazy professionals handle most of our languages automatically.
We decided to keep translating ROUVY into Czech on our own to keep up with the platform and to test if everything was uploaded and processed correctly. We can solve potential errors before the release takes place this way.
The fun thing is our users from China and Poland reached out to us and asked if they could help us translate ROUVY into their language, so we invited them to Localazy and allowed them to translate ROUVY for themselves on a volunteer basis. This is pretty awesome, and I enjoy combining our in-house people, automated professional translations, and crowdsourcing the translations from the community in one project without too much management needed to make everything work.
This is awesome! 🤩 This is precisely what is the vision behind Localazy. On to the next question, what is your experience with Localazy support and communicating with our team?
We don't need to contact support very often, which should be good because our needs are covered. But whenever I needed something, I contacted one of your team members directly and promptly got an answer.
Glad to hear that! Thank you for your time, Lukáš. Would you like to say anything else about your experience with Localazy? 😊
I just want to emphasize that Localazy is a really user-friendly platform, and our developers love the set-and-forget philosophy. And thank you for the fantastic business relationship we have established together!
Thank you, too, Lukáš! Happy localizing! 😁
Source: Rouvy.com Homepage✔️ Conclusion
If you are a cyclist, we recommend you 🚴 check out ROUVY and enjoy indoor cycling in the comfort of your home, no matter the weather! And if you are curious about software & content localization with Localazy, stay a little longer and 📰 read more stories on our blog or 🚩 sign up right away to begin your own localization journey! It can be fun. 😁
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://localazy.com/blog/case-study-rouvy-localization