Getting started
After you sign up to Lokalise, you can familiarize yourself and try a Sample Project or you can start immediately by creating your own project (there's a simple wizard that'll guide you after the registration).
Projects page
The projects dashboard shows all the projects you have access to and provides a brief summary for each one:
This summary includes:
Project completion – you can track the overall progress here.
Base words – the total word count for this project.
Keys – the total amount of keys in this project. Keys are unique identifiers that are used for representing text in the code, in files or elsewhere.
QA issues – you can click and track any issue that our automatic checker has found. These may be grammar/spelling errors, translation reviewing issues, etc.
Apart from looking at the overall project info, you can track the progress of each relevant language separately.
Start a project
Click the New project button.
You'll be asked to choose one of the types:
Choose Software localization to translate JSON, YAML, XLSX, and other key-value files. Choose Ad hoc documents to translate HTML, DOCX, and other similar documents.
The enter all the necessary details like the project name, base and target languages:
If you already have an existing project in another translation management system like Phrase or Transifex, it is possible to transfer your project to Lokalise by choosing the Migrate tab.
Learn more about projects and data it can contain in the Projects article.
Invite team members/contributors
Please note that you can also take advantage of the team visibility feature and allow other members of your organization to join the team.
You can add multiple team members in one go by clicking on your team avatar in the bottom left corner and clicking Team settings:
Proceed to the Team tab and click the Add team member button:
In order to invite project contributors, open your project and click the Contributors button:
You will then see all the contributors with their names and email addresses. You may filter contributors by the language they can access. You may also search for people with the help of the search form.
There are two possible options for adding more people to a project:
Add a contributor by their email address
Import contributors from a different project
Add a new contributor by their email
Click the Add people or groups button:
You will see the following dialog box:
In the first tab, you can invite a new user who is not yet a member of your team. To do so, enter their email address and then assign the necessary roles:
Adding an admin – choose Administrator from the Role dropdown.
Adding a reviewer – tap the Reviewer toggle switch and the user will be able to review translations.
Adding a translator – choose Translator from the Role dropdown, tap the Reviewer switch to Off, and then choose reference languages and contributable languages.
After clicking Add, the new contributor will receive a notification email. S/he will be added to the current project and to your team. Please remember that each newly added contributor occupies a team seat, and different subscription plans provide a different number of available seats.
Import contributors from a different project in Lokalise
Click the Import from project button and simply choose one of the projects.
Note that the users that already exist in the current project will be left intact and their permissions won’t be affected. Also, if a user from the chosen source project has permission to access only a specific language, but this language is not present in your current project, then this user won’t be added as a contributor.
Add existing users
In order to add one or more existing users from your team, click the Add people or groups button and switch to the Add existing users tab:
Choose one of the users from the dropdown list and fill in the other fields which are the same as in the Invite new user tab.
User groups
Instead of inviting one user at a time, you can add a group of users. To achieve that, click the Add people or groups button and switch to the User groups tab:
Choose one of more groups from the dropdown and then click Add.
Contributors rights and roles
Each project contributor can be assigned with different roles.
Administrator (admin) – has full read and write access to all project languages. Additionally, you can choose what other actions the admin will be able to perform. For example, you can allow or disallow them to upload, download files, or manage contributors.
Translator – can read and edit the translations in your project. You can cherry-pick which languages a translator can access.
Reviewer – admins and translators can be assigned with a reviewer role. Reviewers are responsible for quality assurance. They are able to mark translations as “reviewed” effectively saying that this translation is correct and can be used in production. This role is only available if you have the reviewing feature enabled in the project settings.
Project editor overview
When opening a specific project, you will be presented with a project editor. You will be using this editor to manage languages, translation keys, create professional translation orders, and perform other actions. Please note that certain elements might not be visible in your case depending on the project settings and access rights.
Open your projects dashboard.
Checkboxes: select one, multiple or all keys in the list and perform an action on them.
Documentation, API reference, and "Contact support" widget.
Filter to see only specific strings or keys.
Key sorting, e.g., first added or last added.
Key and base words counter: shows how many keys are displayed using the current filter(s). It also shows how many words are there for the base language.
The name of your current project branch. Click on this dropdown to choose a different branch.
Enable display of placeholders/HTML tags as blocks.
Display spell check results.
Filter keys by screenshots.
View and manage translation files.
Display key references as text.
Bookmark your position in the project.
Project main menu.
Add a new translation key to the project.
Search keys by name or part of a name.
Find/Replace strings within the project.
View and manage project languages, add new languages to the project.
Toggle between multilingual and bilingual views.
Magic scroll that helps navigate the keys quickly.
Translation-level comments, custom translation statuses, reviewed and verified statuses, as well as key history.
Quality assurance issues (hover your mouse pointer over this icon to learn more).
Translations for the given key. Click on the translation to bring up the editor.
Screenshot attached to the key.
Translation key name (click to open key editor), linked platforms, and tags.
Quick actions for the given translation key.
Manage style guides for your projects.
Upload translation files
Lokalise supports an array of iOS, Android, Web, and desktop translation file formats.
To start the uploading process, click the Upload button in the top menu:
Drag and drop your files all together or one by one:
Alternatively you can use our API, CLI tool or GitHub, GitLab, and other integrations to upload the files.
Upload screenshots
Screenshots can be used to provide your translators with additional context. You can link screenshots to the translation keys, and these screenshots will appear right in the project editor.
To get started with the screenshots, click the corresponding icon in the top menu:
Drag and drop the screenshot files (JPG, PNG) to the drop area.
Lokalise can automatically recognize the text on the screenshots and link the uploaded screenshots to the keys so they show up in the editor. To achieve that, enable the Try to find keys on images option.
The automatic key tagging system is able to recognize the text on the screenshots, if the text meets the following conditions:
Only the base language values can be recognized. The supported languages are English, Russian, German, Spanish, Italian, Swedish, Finnish, Turkish, and Polish.
Automatic key tagging is able to recognize only existing keys. Please make sure that the key already exists, before trying to link it to the screenshot.
The text must be clearly visible on the screenshots. Depending on the font, background and image quality automatic key tagging may or may not not recognize some strings.
Glossary
Some words should stay the same in all languages. For example, company names. Our Glossary allows you to add any words that require special treatment. Also, there are some words which have more than one meaning. You can add these to the glossary too and write a short explanation. To get started with the glossary, click the corresponding icon in the top menu:
Now you can add new entries or manage the existing ones:
Project activity
You can track all project activity and check what has been done by a specific person in any period of time. To get started, click More > Activity in the main menu:
You will be presented with a list of all the recent events:
These events include translation updates, key modifications, file uploads, and more.
Project statistics
The Statistics module provides you additional insights into your current project translation status. To get started, click on the More button in the top menu and choose Statistics from the dropdown.
You can check:
Translations by language
Translations by contributor
Words translated for a selected period
Words translated for all time
Snapshots
Project snapshots are essentially backups. Restoring from a snapshot creates a project copy with all the data, including translations, keys, settings, and contributors.
To manage project snapshots, click on the More button in the top menu, choose Settings, and then proceed to the Snapshots tab:
Project snapshots are also created automatically when you perform a search/replace operation. If the Automatic snapshot on upload option is enabled, a snapshot will be created on each file import (this option is not available on some subscription plans).
Download files
You can download (export) your project strings to any format supported by Lokalise.
To get started, click the Download icon in the top menu:
Next, adjust the download options as needed:
Alternatively, you can initiate the export via the API.
Translation memory
Translation memory is extremely useful if you are working on more than one project. This feature remembers the accepted translations and offers these to your translators in other projects. There are two ways of accessing this feature:
Translations will be suggested automatically when you click on the translation field.
You can click on the Translation Memory button (or open it using the
Ctrl+Gkey combination) and search for translations manually.
To manage translation memory storages, you'll need to open your team settings and proceed to the Translation memory tab:
QA checks
Quality assurance checks are automatically run whenever someone modifies a translation. Lokalise provides a handful of QA checks for you. To adjust them, click the More icon in the top menu, then proceed to Settings > QA checks.
Each QA check has two escalation levels: Warning and Error.
Warning – the translation will be saved as usual, but a warning notification icon will pop up in the Editor.
Error – this prevents a translator from saving the entry in the web UI (the Editor).
Apps
Integrate Lokalise with the tools you love and use every day. Connect with your favorite productivity tools and code repositories. You can also set up new workflows and event triggers via the API and make the translation process seamless.
To get started with the apps, click More > Apps in the main menu:
Web in-context editor
LiveJS is an in-context JavaScript editor that allows your translators or copywriters to edit your website texts and translations directly in the web page. All changes are shown in the browser and saved directly to Lokalise, not to your localization files or the database running your website.
Professional translation orders
If you don't have your own team of translators, Lokalise offers several translation providers, to help with translating your app or website to the most popular languages.
To get started, click the Orders tab in the side menu:
Next, click New order, choose a translation provider, and adjust other options as needed:
If you choose Lokalise provider then the translator and/or editor will be added directly to your team and will be able to view all the project details including comments, screenshots, glossary, translation memory, and so on. However, please note that these newly added users do not count towards seat limits.
Manage your team
A team can contain many users, and a user may be a member of many teams. To manage your team, click on your avatar in the bottom left corner and choose Team settings:
Learn more about team settings in the corresponding article.
Team roles
If a user is a member of a team, s/he can have one of the following roles:
Owner – a user who initially created a team becomes its owner automatically. An owner can promote other team users to owners. The owners are automatically added to all projects created within a given team and they cannot be removed from these projects. Owners can delete users and projects, and perform other administrative actions.
Admin – can promote team users to administrators, remove users, create projects, and translation orders.
Biller — has the same access rights as admins but additionally billers can manage subscriptions, edit billing details, download invoices, add and remove seats, change payment card, and upgrade/downgrade subscription plan. Billers are not added automatically to the team projects and can be removed from the projects as needed.
Member – team members have restricted rights and can only participate in the team projects. They cannot modify any team settings, manage users, or view sensitive data like billing information.
Adding team users
To add a new team user, click Add team member at the bottom of the Team page:
You'll be presented with the following dialog:
Enter users' email addresses, choose a project to add them to, and adjust their access rights within the project. Please note that all the invited users will have member access rights with the team by default.
Viewing translation reports
To understand how actively a user has participated in a project, you can view translation report for this user. To achieve that, open Team settings > Team, scroll to the bottom of the page, and click Translation reports:
Choose a user, adjust date range, and click Download report:
Check out the Translation reports article to learn more about these reports and to understand how to read them.
User groups
Create a new group by proceeding to Team settings > User groups. Click the Create new group button, give it a name, and then click Add members. After adding group members, open the Permissions tab, where you can assign group permissions.
Subscription
In order to choose the most suitable subscription plan, navigate to Team settings and choose the Billing section.
Here you can see your current subscription plan and the expiration date. Click on the Change current plan link to choose a different subscription.
Tasks
Create a better-structured localization and translation workflow with tasks. Tasks help you to better manage your translators and keep track of their jobs. You can see which job the contributors are currently doing and what is the current progress.
When creating a task, you can choose the keys to include in the task, languages, due dates, etc. It is a good idea to restrict contributors to working only within tasks by enabling the corresponding option in the project settings:
On the first screen of the task creation wizard you can enter the following info:
Task type
Translate — translate from the source into the given target language. On the next step you'll be able to choose task assignees that have been previously added as project contributors.
Review — check the existing translations for the chosen languages.
Automatic translation — use Lokalise AI to quickly translate your texts into the chosen languages. Please refer to the corresponding article to learn more about this feature.
AI LQA — perform localization quality assurance on the provided content in a fully automated way using Lokalise AI. Please refer to the AI LQA article to learn more.
Task title
Task description or instructions for the AI (if the Automatic translation type is chosen) — this field is optional
Due date (unavailable if the Automatic translation type is chosen) — this field is optional
Click Advanced options to adjust the task options (please note that some options might not be available depending on the task type):
Auto-mark items as completed on edit — when this option is enabled, all items added to the task will be automatically marked as completed once the translation is saved. When this option is disabled, the users will see two buttons: one to save the translation, and another to save the translation and mark the item as completed in the task.
Auto-close languages — when creating a task, you can select one or more target languages. For each language a separate sub-task will be created. Therefore, if this option is enabled, the sub-task will be closed once all translations for the specific language are completed.
Auto-close task — when enabled, the task will be automatically closed once all sub-tasks are closed.
Tag keys after the task is closed — when enabled, you'll be able to provide one or more tags that should be assigned to the keys added to this task. The tags will be added only once the task is closed.
Lock translations — when enabled, only the task assignees will be able to modify the translations added to this task.
Restrict assignees to custom translation statuses — this option will become visible if you have custom translation statuses enabled. When enabled, you'll be able to choose which custom statuses will assignees be able to add to the translations. Please note that by default only the project admins can assign or unassign custom translation status to/from translations. However, if you create a new task and enable this option, the assignees will be able to toggle the chosen statuses in the scope of the task. Once the task is closed, the assignees without admin permissions will not be able to toggle the statuses anymore.
Include admins as assignees — include yourself and other project admins to the task. This way you will be able to track the progress from the incoming tasks widget.
Save as task template — this task can be used as a base when creating other tasks (see below for more details).
On the next screen you'll need to provide the task scope, choose the languages, and assignee:
Task scope — adjust the filter to choose the keys that should be added to the task. By default, all untranslated keys are added but you can provide other criteria as needed.
Source language — choose the language that the assignees should translate from. For review tasks, this is a language to use as a reference.
Target languages — choose one or more languages that the assignees should translate into. For review tasks, this is the language that has to be reviewed.
Task assignees — choose one or more project contributors to participate in the task. For every contributor you can choose which languages they have to work with. As you define the task scope and select target languages, the system automatically adds all possible assignees for each language. As potential assignees are displayed, you can click each language box to review or add/remove assignees prior to creating a task.
If you are using vendor rate profiles, you'll be able to choose the vendor rate cards. Please refer to the corresponding article to learn about this feature.
Once you assign a new task to the project contributors, their task inbox will be updated:
In addition, they may receive a notification via email depending on the settings.
That's it! We'll keep updating this guide. If you have any questions or suggestions, please contact us in the support chat.