The Ultimate Solution to Localization Key Challenges

As you may have guessed, today we’re talking about localization keys. If you’re open to it, I’d like to take you through our journey why we decided to create this free product and, most importantly, why you should give it a try.

A Little Story to Begin With

As the COO of my company, alongside my two co-founders, I can tell you that every step of our journey has been filled with challenges. But it was our CTO who really felt the pain in the localization process. He realized that localization wasn't just a technical challenge; it was an opportunity to enhance the impact of our message globally.

That’s when we decided to dive in. First, we created an A/B testing product to optimize word conversion through copywriting. But we quickly realized we needed to go further and build a more comprehensive tool to help companies tackle localization challenges effectively.

Today, we’re offering this product completely free so you can try it yourself. This pivot reflects our commitment to helping everyone achieve the best copywriting while integrating translations tailored to each market.

A Problem That’s Not Easy to Solve

After working with people on more global localization projects, we realized everyone—whether developers or designers was losing a lot of time trying to find and create translation keys. It takes forever, and aside from “homemade solutions” or “DIY” approaches, there’s nothing really convincing to speed up the process.

Let me give you a quick overview of the situation developers and designers face (you might recognize yourselves here). For developers, manually creating keys is time-consuming, and conflicts arise when they create similar or contradictory keys. Designers, on the other hand, lack visibility into key associations, which can lead to errors and inconsistencies in the design. Since keys are usually generated by developers, this process slows down the workflow. Additionally, when a designer wants to change a text or element, it’s hard to identify where the key is used.

I've chatted with well over 200 Designers, Developers and Product Managers about this. While this setup is quite common across companies, some do handle their localization rather differently. In some places, it's the Designers or PMs who create the keys rather than the developers, but as you might imagine, it remains a rather tedious and low-value task.Creating, managing and retrieving keys takes up valuable time for everyone involved, regardless of their role. For developers particularly, having localization keys visible directly in Figma is simply essential - it just makes perfect sense.

To illustrate my point and help you understand the visual difference between the two, I’ve prepared an illustration that shows what the keys look like, how they’re written (approximately, since there are several ways to write them), and why, for designers, finding keys can sometimes be quite tricky.

Now, the Solution

Let’s move on to our solution. After seeing all these problems, it was clear to us that we needed to develop a product that would eliminate this time waste. And we decided to go for a Figma Plugin, that automatically generates translation keys (cool, right?). More broadly, it simplifies the localization process directly within your digital product workflow.

What can you do with it? We’ve developed several features to make localization key management easier: it analyzes existing keys to avoid duplicates and understand your project’s naming conventions. It automatically generates keys using the context of your design file, and then displays them directly in Figma to help you integrate them easily into your projects.

And it’s just the beginning, we have tons of features to add, to finally make localization simple and intuitive.

What You’ll Gain

Now, we’re at the most important part for me: explaining exactly how this free product can be useful to you (it would be a shame to miss out). First of all, you’ll save valuable time! On top of that, we’ve eliminated formatting inconsistencies, which will allow you to have cleaner, more organized code. Finally, having an overview of translated keys and those pending translation has been a real game changer, helping you track project progress in a simple and clear way.

Let’s Take a Look at the Steps (With Images)

After logging in, you’ll be able to easily import your keys and select a frame with the keys you want to generate. The keys will then be automatically created.

Once that’s done, you can download your keys and edit, rename, or delete them (we won’t hold it against you, promise!). You can also see if any keys already exist. The second to last step is to create an export file.

That’s it! Now just download your keys in .csv or .json format.

Et voilà!

Our plugin is currently in private beta. Wanna give it a try before anybody? Fill up this quick survey, and I’ll personally get back to you.

Give it a try, it’s free, and you might save valuable hours every week!

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