The Challenge
In July 2020, Havas Lynx Faze came to us to translate some recruitment advertisements they were putting together for a client. This is the kind of work we do every day, and work that we particularly enjoy, so we eagerly agreed and got started with our usual processing and file preparation stages. At which point, we realized we had a bit of a problem. The files had been produced in a tool we had not worked with up to that point; an application called Figma. For those of you who are not familiar, Figma is a collaborative design tool beloved of creative teams. It allows multiple individuals to work on a design at the same time, can be used to create interactive prototypes, and is hugely expandable. So, it’s not hard to see why the team at Havas Lynx Faze had chosen this tool to complete their design work. The problem for us, as we found out pretty quickly, was that Figma did not export any formats that were suitable for translation! Not a single one!
What Conversis did
As this was a relatively small project and time was of the essence, we set about looking for existing solutions. Surely, we thought, someone else has had this issue before now! Which is how we discovered the Figma Community, and the many plugins others have created to customize their use of the tool. In amongst the HTML, image, and wireframe tools, we found a handful of translation plugins, ready for us to use. Following all relevant due diligence, testing, and communication with the client, we got to work using these tools, and managed to deliver our usual excellent quality. But the road to that delivery was not easy. Why? Because none of the existing plugins exported content in a format that allowed us to translate effectively. Every tool available lost the majority of formatting on export and import, and there was no information in the file to pull it back in. Some even exported the content in alphabetical order, rather than the order of the source file! This meant an exponential increase in DTP work, and manual referencing by the linguists, for whom the working file lacked essential context. Our review and quality assurance phases also had to be amped up to check and correct any resulting human error. It was clear that this was not a process compatible with The Conversis Way, and any future Figma work would require careful thought.
If You Want Something Done Right…
It was the start of the following year when Havas Lynx Faze brought us another Figma project – this time much larger in scale. That’s when our CTO, Ian Barrow, got on the case. Having seen how many plugins had been developed for Figma, Ian decided to look into how he could go about creating one himself. He found that Figma has an API interface that allows plugins to be made in JavaScript and integrated into the application. So, in true Conversis style, he went ahead and made one! Having never worked in JavaScript before, Ian worked out the logic of how text content is stored and structured in Figma, decided on xml as the most appropriate format, and – within a couple of weeks – he had created a plugin that allowed content to be imported and exported complete with formatting for quick, efficient translation.
"I love this plugin! It's simple to use and it allows us to easily export content for translation and import translated text while retaining all formatting. Especially incredible considering it's a free plugin!"
