In mobile development, speed matters. Most teams move in tight, two-week sprints. They are agile and fast until they reach the localization step.
While your developers are shipping features every 14 days, traditional translation agencies are often still stuck in a six-week turnaround. This can be a bottleneck that can postpone a global app launch.
If you want to scale and keep the pace, you have to stop treating translation as a final check-box and start treating it as part of your code.
The Real Reason Your Releases Are Lagging
Imagine: your app is ready, bugs are squashed. But the release is stuck because someone is still waiting on the Japanese strings to come back via email.
We need to talk about the code freeze. For many teams, this is a week of dead time where developers are banned from touching the UI because the strings have already been sent out for translation.
Think about how absurd that is. You are paying top-tier engineers to sit on their hands (or work on bugs) simply because your translation process cannot handle a mid-week update.
In the old-school waterfall model, the localization process is quite manual. It usually looks like this:
- A developer runs a script to scrape all the new strings.
- They manually package
.strings(iOS) orstrings.xml(Android) files. - They email a zip file to a Project Manager.
- The PM sends it to an agency.
- The agency sends back a spreadsheet three days later.
- The developer manually pastes those values back into the repo, inevitably breaking a tag or missing a semicolon in the process.
This back-and-forth process is simply not working for mobile development. It is slow and full of errors, and frankly, it is a waste of your engineering team’s time (which costs you money).
Make Translations Part of Your CI/CD
The solution is to move to continuous translation.
This concept is simple: treat your translations like any other code dependency. You wouldn’t manually email a library to your server, so why are you doing it with your text?
In a continuous setup, translations do not happen after the work is done. They happen while the code is being written. The goal is simple: by the time a developer opens a Pull Request for a new feature, the translations for that feature should already be waiting.
Continuous translation workflow looks like this:
- Commit: A developer pushes code with a few new English labels.
- Sync: Your CI pipeline (GitHub, etc.) spots the changes and pushes them to a Translation Management System (TMS) instantly.
- Translate: Translators get a ping and start working immediately, often while the developer is still finishing the branch.
- Merge: The translated strings flow back into your repo automatically as a PR. No manual intervention required.
Step 1: Set Up the Automated String Sync
The first rule of continuous translation: never touch a localization file again.
Whether you are on iOS or Android, your repo is full of .strings, .stringsdict, or .xml files. You need to configure your system to “watch” these specific files.
Pro-tip for devs: Do not use generic keys. Use descriptive ones. btn_save_01 is useless. settings_profile_save_button tells everyone exactly where that string lives. When your system is automated, your naming conventions become your roadmap.
Step 2: Automate the Pipeline
Automation is the only way this works. If a human has to remember to click the sync button, the system is not automated. People forget, people go on vacation. Pipelines don’t.
Your localization workflow should be as automated as your testing suite. By adopting continuous localization, you effectively eliminate the translation lag. New strings flow to translators the moment code is committed, and finished translations flow back into the build automatically, ensuring every release is multilingual by default.
This bridge turns localization into a background process that just happens.
Over-the-Air (OTA) Updates
Even with a perfect pipeline, you are still dependent on the App Store and Play Store review cycles. If you find a typo five minutes after you hit the submit button, you are usually stuck with it for days.
Over-the-Air (OTA) updates solve this by letting you hotfix text without a new release.
Most modern translation management systems provide a lightweight SDK. Instead of only relying on the hard-coded .strings or .xml files bundled in your build, the SDK checks for updates in the background whenever the user opens the app.
Step 3: Solve the Context Problem
The biggest problem for translators is a lack of context. If they see the word “scale” in a spreadsheet, they don’t know for sure if you’re talking about a kitchen tool, a map legend, or a musical note.
In a traditional setup, this results in 20 emails full of questions and mistakes.
How to fix that? Use automated screenshots. Modern TMSs provide tools that can take screenshots of your app’s UI during the build process and attach them to the strings in the TMS. When the translator looks at a string, they see exactly where it sits in the app. They see the button size, the background color, and the surrounding text. This “What You See Is What You Get” (WYSIWYG) approach kills the guesswork and prevents the dreaded “text overflow” where a German word is three times longer than the button it lives in.
Step 4: Quality Control
Continuous doesn’t mean messy. You can still have high standards without the slowdown.
- Glossaries: Create a dictionary of your brand terms. If you call it “Dashboard”, the translator shouldn’t call it a “Control Panel” in the translations.
- Translation memory: Never pay for the same sentence twice. If you have already translated “Forgotten your password?”, the system should fill it in automatically every time it sees it again.
- Real-time QA: Use tools that flag errors (like missing placeholders or mismatched punctuation) before the strings ever make it back to your codebase.
Conclusion
The standard for mobile app development has changed. Users in Berlin or Tokyo do not want to wait 3 weeks for the features that the US users already have. If your app is not ready in every language on launch day, you need to fix the pipeline.
Continuous translation is a big shift for your team. Let’s move away from managing files and move toward managing flow. When you automate the manual stuff (extracting, zipping, emailing), you free up your team to do what they actually enjoy: building a great product.
Build a pipeline that never stops. Build a continuous translation workflow.