Bureau Works vs. Lokalise

Online software and mobile app localization tools emerged to simplify how global companies launch products. A new generation of tools is disrupting desktop localization tools such as Passolo, and some of the most popular options are Lokalise and Bureau Works. While both address the same need, the difference in feature sets is colossal. 

Lokalise is geared towards in-context editing and JavaScript localization solution that works with popular developer frameworks. It similarly serves mobile apps via the Over-the-Air approach. For designers, it offers Figma and Sketch integrations. However, for translators and language specialists, Lokalise offers very little. 

Bureau Works does not have JS localization or Over-the-Air; instead, it relies on API, watch folders, and fully-fledged plugins for integrations. However, its support for language assets, text quality, terminology, and customer review leaves Lokalise far behind.

Overview

Localise Overview

Lokalise is a Latvia-based company founded in 2017 and created to provide a comprehensive online developer tool. It was conceived and developed by a team of passionate developers who understood the challenges, issues, and complexities of the localization process. Over the years, Lokalise has emerged as a leading platform that caters specifically to the needs of developers, making the localization process more efficient and streamlined.

What sets Lokalise apart is its commitment to continuous improvement and innovation. The platform has constantly evolved and added new features to enhance its capabilities. With an intuitive interface and powerful functionality, Lokalise enables developers to seamlessly manage the localization of content in their software applications, websites, and other digital products.

Lokalise offers many tools and features to simplify the localization workflow. These include translation management, collaborative editing, version control, and integration with popular development tools and platforms. The platform also supports multiple file formats, making it compatible with various programming languages and frameworks.

With its user-friendly interface and robust functionality, Lokalise has gained a serious audience and a strong foothold in the developer community. It has earned the trust of renowned companies and organizations worldwide, helping them achieve faster time-to-market and improved content localization quality.

Bureau Works Overview

Bureau Works is a translation management system introduced by a prominent US-based translation company in 2018. With a strong focus on agility and flexibility, Bureau Works caters to product teams who embrace Agile methodology and subject matter experts (SMEs) seeking efficient translation solutions. This platform is tailored to the needs of users who value adjustable and API-first software, avoiding the cumbersome nature of heavy enterprise systems.

The Bureau Works translation management system offers a host of features designed to streamline the translation process and enhance collaboration. Its user-friendly interface allows teams to efficiently manage translation projects, track progress, and communicate effectively with translators and reviewers. The system also provides powerful automation capabilities, allowing for the seamless integration of translation tasks into the overall product development workflow.

One of the key advantages of Bureau Works is its adaptability. The platform can be customized to meet the specific requirements of different projects and industries. It offers flexible workflows, configurable dashboards, and customizable notifications, ensuring that each user can tailor the system to their unique needs.

Additionally, Bureau Works emphasizes an API-first approach, enabling seamless integration with other tools and systems commonly used by product teams. This allows for a more streamlined and efficient translation process, reducing manual effort and increasing overall job productivity.

Since its launch, Bureau Works has gained recognition and trust from numerous companies across industries. Its commitment to agility, flexibility, transparency and collaboration has made it a preferred choice for teams looking to optimize their own language translation management workflows.

Key Differences Between Bureau Works and Lokalise

When managing translation for businesses, choosing the right platform can greatly impact efficiency and quality. Two prominent platforms in the market, Bureau Works and Lokalise, offer comprehensive translation services. Here, we will explore the key differences between Bureau Works and Lokalise, highlighting their unique features and benefits. By understanding these distinctions, businesses can make an informed decision to meet their specific translation needs effectively.

Translation Services Offered

Bureau Works: Bureau Works provides professional translation services focusing on accuracy and high-quality outputs. They have a vast network of expert translators who are native speakers of their respective languages and markets. Bureau Works ensures that each translation project is first reviewed and assigned to choose the most suitable translator to maintain consistent quality across various content types.

Lokalise: While Lokalise primarily offers software localization services, they also provide general translation services for businesses. Their platform focuses on helping companies streamline and automate the translation process within their software development workflow. Lokalise allows teams to collaborate, translate together, manage and automate translation tasks, and handle localization projects efficiently.

Machine Translation Integration

Bureau Works: Bureau Works understands the value of machine translation (MT) as a powerful tool to improve productivity. They integrate Machine Translation engines seamlessly into their workflow to augment human translation speed without compromising quality or accuracy. By leveraging the latest advancements in Machine Translation technology, Bureau Works ensures that professional human translators refine the output to deliver accurate translations.

Lokalise: Lokalise also offers machine translation integration, allowing users to choose and leverage Machine Translation engines for initial translations. The platform enables users to select their preferred Machine Translation engines and customize their machine translation and workflow. However, unlike Bureau Works, Lokalise focuses more on the software localization aspect, where MT integration is crucial in speeding up the machine translation and process for strings within software interfaces.

Translation Memory (TM) Management

Bureau Works: Bureau Works understands the importance of translation memory for consistent and efficient translations. They utilize advanced translation memory technology to store previously translated segments and leverage them for future projects. This ensures consistent terminology and speeds up the translation process, resulting in higher quality and reduced costs.

Lokalise: Lokalise also offers translation memory management technology, allowing businesses to save and reuse translations for strings of the text created within their software projects. However, compared to Bureau Works, Lokalise's TM management is more tailored towards software localization, where text strings are often repetitive, and leveraging TM can significantly enhance translation efficiency.

Translation Quality Control

Bureau Works: Bureau Works places a strong emphasis on translation quality control. They have a robust quality assurance process involving multiple layers of review by professional translators and subject matter experts. This meticulous approach ensures that translations are accurate, culturally appropriate, and adhere to the specific requirements of each project. Bureau Works strives to deliver translations of the highest quality for their clients.

Lokalise: Lokalise also offers quality control and transparency mechanisms, including a review process and collaboration features to ensure accurate text translations within their software localization workflow. However, since their primary business focus is software localization, the quality control measures might not be as extensive as those provided by Bureau Works for general translation projects.

Content Scope

Bureau Works: Bureau Works handles translating various multimedia content types, including marketing materials, legal documents, technical manuals, websites, etc. They have expertise in diverse industries and markets and ensure that the translation accurately reflects the nuances and context of the source content.

Lokalise: Lokalise primarily focuses on software localization, making it an ideal choice for businesses in the software development industry. Their platform is specifically designed to handle strings within software interfaces, allowing for seamless translation and localization of user interfaces, app content, and other software-related materials.

Customization and Integration

Bureau Works: Bureau Works offers a high level of customization and integration capabilities to align with a business's specific translation needs. They understand that every client is unique, and their platform allows for seamless integration with existing systems, tools, data and workflows to ensure a smooth translation process.

Lokalise: Lokalise is known for its strong integration capabilities, particularly within the software development ecosystem. The platform integrates well with popular development tools like GitHub, Bitbucket, and Jira, enabling efficient translation management within the existing software development workflow.

Project Management and Collaboration

Bureau Works: Bureau Works provides dedicated project managers who oversee the translation process and ensure effective communication between business clients and translators. Their project management approach streamlines the workflow, allowing businesses to focus on their core business activities while leaving the job of translation management in capable hands.

Lokalise: Lokalise offers collaboration features that enable teams to connect and work together seamlessly on translation projects. It facilitates communication, feedback on changes, and revision tracking, making it convenient for software development teams to manage translations and changes within their development environment.

Scalability

Bureau Works: Bureau Works is well-equipped to handle large-scale translation and multimedia projects. Their extensive network of professional translators allows them to manage multiple projects simultaneously while maintaining consistent translation quality and consistency across all languages, markets, languages and content types.

Lokalise: Lokalise is designed to provide support for agile development processes and can scale with the growing translation needs of software projects. Lokalise's collaborative features and integration capabilities suit small and large development teams.

Customer Support

Bureau Works: Bureau Works prides itself on providing exceptional customer support throughout the translation. Their team of experts is readily available to address any questions, concerns, or specific changes in requirements, ensuring a smooth and satisfactory experience for customers and future clients.

Lokalise: Lokalise offers customer support through various channels, including live chat, email, and a comprehensive knowledge base. Their support team assists users with technical issues or inquiries about the platform's functionalities.

Pricing Structure

Bureau Works: Bureau Works offers customers customized pricing based on the specific requirements of each project. They consider content complexity, language pairs, volume, and desired turnaround time to provide customers with transparent and tailored pricing options.

Lokalise: Lokalise offers pricing plans based on the number of users and projects, with additional add-ons for specific skills and features. Their pricing structure is designed to cater to the needs of software development teams and aligns with the scalable nature of their platform.

Similar Features of Both Bureau Works and Lokalise

As businesses expand globally, effective translation and localization solutions become increasingly important. Two prominent players in this field are Bureau Works and Lokalise. While each platform has unique features, they also share similarities that make them attractive choices for companies seeking professional translation services. In this article, we will explore the common features of both Bureau Works and Lokalise, highlighting their use of machine translation, artificial intelligence, human call, translation services, native language support, and translation memories.

Artificial Intelligence: Artificial intelligence (AI) significantly changes and enhances the translation process on both platforms. AI algorithms improve the quality of human and machine translations, ensuring more accurate and contextually appropriate results for future use. Additionally, AI-powered tools assist in managing and organizing translation projects, allowing for efficient collaboration between translators, project managers, internal stakeholders, and clients.

Professional Translation Services: Bureau Works and Lokalise offer translation services catering to the diverse needs of businesses. Both platforms provide access to a vast network of skilled translators who specialize in various industries and languages, whether translating marketing materials, software interfaces, or legal documents. This ensures high-quality translations that capture the nuances and cultural aspects of the target language.

Native Language Support: Recognizing the importance of native language expertise, Bureau Works and Lokalise prioritize working with translators fluent in one language, their native languages. This ensures that translations are not only linguistically accurate but also culturally appropriate. Both platforms deliver translations that resonate with target markets and audiences by providing access to a global network of native-speaking translators.

Security and Confidentiality: Bureau Works and Lokalise understand the importance of data security and confidentiality. They employ robust security measures, such as encryption and access controls, to protect client data and ensure that sensitive business information remains confidential.

Artificial Intelligence Capacity

Lokalise

Lokalise serves as an all-encompassing localization platform that has introduced a groundbreaking AI localization assistant called Lokalise AI. This innovative tool is designed to transform the translation process by providing a fully automated localization solution. With its advanced features, Lokalise AI enables users to translate content while maintaining contextual comprehension, resulting in precise and significant translations.

Moreover, it goes beyond conventional translation methods by exploring various alternative variants and refining the translated material to ensure readability and adherence to specific styles. By harnessing the power of artificial intelligence, Lokalise AI revolutionizes the localization landscape, streamlining the workflow and enhancing the overall quality of translations.

With Lokalise AI, users can confidently rely on an intelligent assistant that facilitates the localization process and ensures their translated content's accuracy, meaning, and linguistic finesse.

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Bureau Works

Bureau Works offers a comprehensive set of AI-powered features for efficient translation management. With access controls and permissions, users can secure project information. The platform excels in booking management, scheduling translation tasks, and tracking deadlines. Real-time collaboration tools facilitate seamless communication among team members.

Through AI automation, Bureau Works reduces manual effort in repetitive localization tasks. Utilizing machine translation technology, content is translated swiftly, boosting productivity. Project tracking ensures milestones are met on time. Quality control measures guarantee accurate and consistent translations.

With workflow management, Bureau Works streamlines and automates the translation process, ensuring efficient task execution.

Conclusion

Bureau Works and Lokalise are powerful platforms offering comprehensive translation and localization solutions. However, their focus and feature sets differ, catering to different needs within the translation industry. Lokalise excels in software localization, offering in-context editing, JavaScript localization, and seamless integration with popular developer frameworks. It is ideal for developers and teams working on software and mobile app localization. However, it lacks extensive support for translators and language specialists, which may be a drawback for businesses needing broader translation services. In contrast, Bureau Works provides a comprehensive translation management system, focusing on quality, terminology management, and customer review. It offers customization, integration options, and dedicated project managers for efficient collaboration.

Ultimately, the choice between Bureau Works and Lokalise depends on the specific needs of businesses. For companies primarily focused on software localization and developer workflows, Lokalise may be the ideal solution. However, Bureau Works offers a more suitable option for organizations seeking comprehensive translation services, proper pricing and payment structure, advanced quality control, and a customizable translation management system. It is recommended that businesses carefully evaluate their requirements, consider the unique features and benefits of each platform, and choose the one that aligns with their goals and priorities to ensure successful and efficient translation processes.

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