Dashlane

Increase the length, mix in multiple character types, and definitely don't use your dog's name. We all know the commandments of creating a strong password, but as our digital lives have expanded to include dozens of different accounts, our quest for convenience has tempted many of us toward committing security sins.

Dashlane, now the leading global password manager, was created to spare internet users from this moral dilemma and address all of their password management problems with a single, simple solution.

The app which ultimately emerged from this mission statement quickly won praise from tech insiders and everyday users alike. But to continue the company's upward trajectory, executives knew they needed to make a more conscious outreach to their growing global audience.

The Challenge: Quality, At a Cost

Part of Dashlane's promise is its unique ability to make complex technology feel approachable to every user. As a result, marketers needed to know that the copywriting style they had carefully cultivated would carry over into foreign language content as well.

These quality concerns were easily addressed when expanding into French, as translations were completed by the company's largely bilingual staff. But adding linguistic tasks on top of employees' existing responsibilties was not an ideal approach for the already-lean startup.

The team's internal content management system was also placing a strain on the entire localization process. Gathering and replacing text strings proved to be unexpectedly difficult for developers, and the pace of product updates was starting to suffer as a result.

With all these inefficiencies soon magnified by the addition of a language services agency supplying Spanish translations of questionable quality, Dashlane decided it was time to make a proactive change.

“It had become impossible to scale our workflow into additional languages. We needed to make a move that would allow us to seamlessly support more customers while preserving our high standards of content quality.“

The Solution: Smartling

The first order of business would be finding a new process that insulated product development from the day-towork of translation. Not surprisingly, the tech-savvy startup sought its solution in software.

The Smartling translation management platform first sparked the team's interest with a set of visual context capabilities that weren't available anywhere else. It translators, editors, and reviewers could see exactly where target text would be displayed on a page or in an app, then Dashlane knew many of its former copywriting debates and formatting frustrations could be proactively resolved.

Even more influential, however, was Smartling's ability to help Dashlane simplify and standardize the delivery of content across every language.

"Whether the text is English, French, or Japanese, all content updates look the same to our developers," explained Dashlane localization manager Manon Berdu. “By keeping all the copywriting complexities invisible to our developers, we can quickly address marketing requests without taking engineers away from where they're needed most.”

These seemingly simple fixes have driven dramatic improvements in both translation quality and delivery speed. And with Smartling's translator community now enabling all Dashlane employees to focus on their original assignments full-time, the company's continued innovation and thoughtful localization contributed to a 4x increase in active users in 2016 alone.