We (want to) speak your language

Our mission is to be the best place to share knowledge with the world - and that means support for multiple languages! While HeySummit is still an early-stage company, one of the most requested features we've had is a translation of the platform to allow our customers to use HeySummit in the native language of their target customers and attendees. We pride ourselves on providing exceptional support, and while we wanted to do all we can to support as many languages as possible, we also had to ensure our customers are able to depend on a certain level of support. That also has a knock-on effect with the support needs for our customer's attendees, and we have a responsibility to provide clear, understandable guidelines with how we use data that anyone, including summit attendees, must be able to understand. So, we prioritized new languages based on customer feedback.

That got us thinking: how could we best to accomplish this? Well, we've been doing our research and want to share our process. Here's a look behind the scenes of how we intend to take a major feature from zero to live within a year.

Stage 1: Making HeySummit's attendee experience translatable

The first stage of research and development had the overall aim of providing translation options ASAP. While this will make HeySummit translatable from an attendee perspective, it will not be dealing with the backend organizer experience, nor will we be able to support the additional languages with support (we won't be able to answer questions in the language, so event organizers will have to still be able to speak English).

Requirements

Detailed list of all front-facing platform elements
Making minor changes to the platform to accommodate multiple languages
Sourcing translations for each language we look to support

Timeline

First 3 weeks: Research into technical changes
Week 4: First language tested
Week 6: Crowd-sourced language translation available

What this means

After we tested the system through supporting one language, we opened up the language translation process to the community so HeySummiteers could translate HeySummit into the language of their choosing, or select from a list of community-added languages. We also began the process of certifying those languages as accurate.

Stage 2: Native Multilingual Support

The second stage will involve investing in support team members and translation of how-to documents, and making it possible for the backend to be changed into different languages.

Requirements

Hiring enough dedicated team members who speak the language so we can offer the same exceptional customer support experience
Significant translation of help documentation and tutorials
Translation of the backend experience

Timeline

This is dependent on our growth and the people we can bring on board, however we don't expect to be able to fully support customers outside of the English language for at least 1 year.

Current status

Your HeySummit site is now fully translatable! We're super excited to bring you this feature and welcome your feedback. This also means some editable fields will now be found in different locations. There are two aspects to our translations:

Anyone can now manually translate and customize

When you go into your HeySummit event dashboard, and click Content you'll now see a new option: Translations. This will give you granular control of every bit of text we have available on the HeySummit site that is visible to your attendees. This is also where many of the older ways of changing certain phrases will be found. This means you can customize the translations that you load in. This is also useful if you don't want to translate but want more granular control of what is stated where. Any changes to translations or language is event specific and will only be applied to your event.

Pre-loaded languages

Our language ambassadors are busy helping us translate HeySummit, and when these options are ready, they'll be able to be automatically translated for you in Event Setup > Settings > Localization.

Feel free to explore, and if you are interested in translating HeySummit and being a Language Ambassador, please click here.

Love what you're reading? Why not have a go at hosting your very own summit- on us. Here's a link to your free trial with HeySummit. While you're at it, watch our awesome live demo! Happy summiting 🏔️

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