Dymax

Dymax is a global company that provides development and cutting-edge solutions for manufacturers in multiple industries. With seven hubs worldwide, they have a vested interest in ensuring their website content is easily accessible and understood in multi-lingual markets. This means having a robust service to accurately translate content quickly.

Dymax had used a proxy service for translations. While the solution provided quality translations, it was expensive and didn’t provide an easy way for editors to make corrections or adjustments to the translated content. Due to the nature of Dymax’s products, there are many scientific and chemical terms that require specific translations outside of the scope of common use.  To update these terms, multiple tickets would often be required to implement a correction.  The whole process was costing not just the service fees, but a considerable amount of administrative time on the part of Dymax.

Dymax and Mugo Web had become development partners earlier in 2024, and when Global Digital Marketing Communications Manager Kim Burns brought the issue to the Mugo team, she was looking at replacing the multi-language site translation with a Google Translate widget. Project Manager and Developer Paulo Valle knew that was one solution, but it wouldn’t fulfill the requirement of translation specificity that Dymax needed. This led to the creation of Mugo Translate, a custom-built solution that drew on both the Google Translate API and the robust multilingual tools of the Ibexa DXP.

Mugo Translate features

Mugo Translate is the best of all worlds: automated translation built into the CMS, editable interfaces for every page, a custom glossary of unique terms and words for optimal accuracy, and massive savings in service fees and staff time. “The solution was the best of what we could ask for,” said Burns.

New process for translating content

Now, when Dymax creates a new page, the author goes to the Translations tab in the CMS. There, they can choose from a list of selected languages. In Dymax’s case, they chose the languages most commonly used in their hub locations. The user can select one or more from this list.

With the languages designated, the user then selects the red “Translate with Google API” button. This creates a new, editable page for that language’s translation, utilizing the custom glossary for accuracy. On the front end, the translation is accessible via a drop-down list. Once the language is selected, it  displays the translated page, with the appropriate URL, a necessary component of good SEO.

Automatic translation with Google Translate API

The team knew they wanted to leverage the Google Translate API for the actual translation work. Google Translate has existed since 2006 and supports 243 languages. While not always perfectly accurate, the machine translation service has the benefit of longevity and documented use. Additionally, it supported the addition of custom glossaries, which other products did not.

The challenge to using Google Translate was the expense. The API charges by character, and if the system were retranslating for every visitor and every page, the new cost-effective solution would quickly become cost-prohibitive. The answer to this was clever caching and storing the translation inside the CMS.

When content is translated, it is translated once. The Ibexa DXP already has strong support for multi-lingual sites, so creating new page versions was a simple process. This has the added benefit of creating an editable page that site admins can easily open and make adjustments to as needed and immediately. There’s no need to deal with a complicated 3^rd party ticketing system to edit content on the site they own.

Custom glossaries

A primary benefit of Google Translate is support for custom glossaries for each of the target audience languages. Dymax site admins can now maintain a database of terms directly related to their product that need a more accurate translation. The difference between the automated translation and the translation with a custom glossary might seem superficial to a non-native speaker of the language, but can in fact drastically change the meaning of a phrase or product description, particularly when discussing manufacturing terms where specificity is a matter of safety. This distinction is important for businesses to show they care about their clients and are committed to accuracy and clear communication.

With the glossary in place, the translation looks for specific words and prioritizes using the glossary translation ahead of less accurate automatic translations. New words can be added to the glossaries for future use.

SEO flexibility

Front-end automatic translations, while providing support for many more languages, don’t appear in search results. Potential Dymax clients who search for products and services and use terms in a language other than English would be missed, as the site would not appear prioritized for them. SEO was an important consideration for Dymax’s B2B marketing.

The Ibexa DXP makes creating side-by-side multi-language content easy. Each page has a language-specific URL and utilizes the appropriate tags to flag the content for search engines. With dedicated parallel sites for each of the primary languages spoken at Dymax’s manufacturing locations, the company knew it was going to have better success reaching its target audiences.

Templated design

Another benefit of hosting the translation in the CMS was allowing for customization of the templates to support the translation in all elements. A challenge to automatic translations is making sure that the correct content is translated, including text that appears over images, buttons, and menus. There are many elements to a webpage, and making sure that everything is translated isn’t as easy as selecting the text body. “Richtext fields are complex objects, and we spent a lot of time testing and debugging,” reported Maxim Strukov, a developer on the project.

The testing paid off. Strukov was able to identify some issues with custom tags that needed to be excluded from translation and apply fixes before launch.

Risks and challenges

Overall, the teams at Mugo Web and Dymax were able to collaborate fully to overcome the numerous risks and challenges inherent in this project.

“The more we thought through the solution, the more complex it became,” Valle admitted. “The first challenge was convincing ourselves and the client that we had the right approach in the long run.”

Luckily, Dymax was willing to trust Mugo Web.

“The collaboration was great,” said Burns. “We determined a better solution together, once we realized the approach we thought we wanted wouldn’t work. Mugo coached us in the right direction. On our side, we just had to reach out and say what we needed. Without this back-and-forth collaboration, we would have ended up spending more money without the benefits we gained.”

The Mugo Web Development team was confident in the solution, despite the challenges, because they knew they could rely on what they did best- custom CMS development.

“There were a series of risks,” Doug Plant, Mugo Web Partner and Developer, said. “Hosting, caching, and the timeline were all challenges, but we knew that if we could put those in the CMS and contain those risks, we’d be able to deal with them. That was the part that made us happy, being able to rely on the CMS.”

The biggest risk was largely out of the control of everyone involved- the timeline. Dymax was coming up on a contract deadline for their existing translation service. This was also undertaken at the end of the year. The project had about 3 months of development time before launch, during a time when many people were celebrating holidays and out of the office. Mugo’s team had a backup plan in place just in case the desired solution wasn’t going to be ready on time- a redundancy that didn’t need to be used. The new solution was launched within 10 weeks of development from proof of concept to deployment.

A successful launch

“Launching the solution was my favorite part of the project! It’s been well received,” Burns said about the product following launch. “The editors like it, and the training was straightforward. The solution has been adopted without an issue across Europe, Asia, and North America.”

Strukov agreed. “It’s not often I get the chance to develop something this complex on the backend. It was a challenging and interesting project. And we were able to build all this functionality as a bundle, which will be useful on other projects needing complex translations.”