Each month, our Ecosystem team and Technology Partners collaborate to bring platform users exciting new integrations, opening up new opportunities to customize and extend their Contentful use cases.

True to form, we have an exciting update dropping this month from one of our premier technology partners, Phrase. Version 2 of the Phrase integration for Contentful is now available on the Contentful Marketplace. 

And, if you already liked Phrase, you’re going to love this version — it’s chock-full of performance enhancements to help your brand expand to new markets in a more efficient manner. Let’s dig a little deeper into how Phrase achieves this. 

Meet the Phrase Platform, your localization BFF

As companies like yours venture into globalization, a unified hurdle arises: creating and managing content for multiple languages across different platforms and regions (and don’t forget about dialects). In short, there are simply too many things to create, edit, and maintain — and not enough hours in the day. 

As a result, localization is often labeled as a daunting task. Phrase strips localization of this label, making it into a light lift by providing tools to help your team quickly and easily generate content in a variety of languages without exorbitant translation and transcreation costs. 

Jumping into the technical nuances, V2 of the Phrase integration facilitates the deployment of your content to a broader audience faster by incorporating a powerful, AI-driven translation management into Contentful's interface. 

Whether you need to quickly roll out seven localized websites, or manage a library of blog posts translated into four languages, this integration simplifies the workflows that lead up to launching those items, ultimately speeding up time to market, and ensuring your message (and brand) shows up clear and cohesive in every market.

By removing the friction from translation workflows, the integration offers automated processes and advanced translation management capabilities. Users can submit content for translation directly from the Contentful environment to the Phrase Platform. The best part? The translations are automatically pushed back into Contentful, eliminating the need to switch between platforms and reducing manual effort.

Key integration features

• Automated translation workflows: As soon as content is submitted in Contentful, the translation process is triggered within Phrase, ensuring that multilingual content is published faster.

• Real-time tracking: Users can monitor the progress of translation projects without leaving the Contentful interface.

• Separate language submissions: Users can submit languages for translation independently, allowing quicker time to market for specific regions.

Putting the Phrase Platform to work

With the benefits of Phrase neatly laid out, you’re probably eager to test it out for yourself. And we have more good news for you, if you’re already using Contentful,  you can set up the Phrase Platform in just four simple steps. Ready?

Step 1: Install the Phrase app in your Contentful space.

Step 2: Configure the application with your Phrase authentication token. Then, select the relevant content models.

Step 3: Automate workflows by setting up automated project creation (APC) to detect changes in content size and trigger new localization projects.

Step 4: Monitor translations within the Contentful interface and publish them as soon as they’re complete.

What’s the deal with dialects?

Localization from scratch involves a number of tasks. First, you have to translate the content, then string the translation together, and finally edit those outputs into a version of your content that makes sense to the audience. During that last step, you must account for local dialects and cultural nuances. If you ignore this step, your efforts to resonate with customers might go to waste and they could see your brand as disingenuous. 

Here’s an example to illustrate how dialects work and why they are important. Think of the differences between American and British English. If you’re writing a fashion blog post about winter style trends for a U.S. audience, you’ll include a section on “sweaters.” If you’d like to convert that post into a localized version for your U.K. audience, “sweaters” will be replaced by “jumpers” even though both words represent the same garment. If you fail to account for this dialectal difference, your British readers might not trust your fashion advice — they might think it's not applicable to their area. 

English isn’t the only language with regional dialects, other examples include Spanish (eg., Mexico vs. Spain) and French (eg., France vs. Canada). The proliferation of AI-infused translation tools, like Phrase TMS, has made accounting for dialects and gaining the respect of international audiences much easier.

Now, let’s accelerate localization with AI

Everyone’s eager to implement AI and translation is one category where it shines. The Phrase Platform integrates with over 30 machine translation (MT) engines (including its proprietary MT, Phrase NextMT). 

If you aren’t sure which engine to use, Phrase is equipped to automatically select the one that best suits your needs. This bonus capability ensures high-quality, cost-effective translation results.

Phrase takes this one step further with Automated Project Creation (APC) and solid quality assurance checks — which provide a final check to confirm your content resonates across all the markets you’re trying to reach while remaining high quality and on-brand.

Wrapping up

There are so many reasons to integrate Phrase and Contentful, but perhaps Jason Hemingway, CMO at Phrase, puts it best.

"Our shared commitment to innovation and excellence in digital content management makes this a valuable partnership for our customers," he says.

"It not only enhances our ability to deliver seamless localization but more importantly allows our clients to excel in global markets."

Visit the Contentful Marketplace to try out the Phrase integration yourself.

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