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).

The projects dashboard shows all the projects you have access to and provides a brief summary for each one:

This summary includes:

Apart from looking at the overall project info, you can track the progress of each relevant language separately.

Click the New project button and enter all the necessary details like the project name, description, project type etc.

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.

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:

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:

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.

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.

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.

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.

Each project contributor can be assigned with different roles.

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.

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.

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:

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:

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.

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:

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).

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 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:

To manage translation memory storages, you'll need to open your team settings and proceed to the Translation memory tab:

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. 

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:

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.

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.

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.

If a user is a member of a team, s/he can have one of the following roles: 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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:

On the second screen you'll be able to adjust the task options:

On the third screen you'll need to provide the task scope, choose the languages, and assignee:

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.