Stripo translation features: How to translate, export, and manage your localized emails with ease

Email localization is a cornerstone for expanding your marketing efforts into new markets. It’s an incredibly important process, but one that often causes marketers headaches. A lengthy translation process, structuring translated emails, and much more is involved. However, Stripo strives to make marketers’ lives easier, and email translation is one of the many areas where we can help. In this article, we’ll discuss our translation features in detail and demonstrate how they work to make your multilingual email marketing easier.

Stripo translation features basics

Before we dive into a detailed guide, it’s worth briefly explaining the options for translating your templates using Stripo. You have two options:

• automatic translation using Google Translate;
• uploading XLS and JSON files with translations.

Let's quickly review each option so you understand what’s going on and can figure out how to use each method to your advantage.

Translation via Google Translate

The name pretty much speaks for itself. We’re integrated with Google Translate, allowing you to fully translate templates into multiple languages ​​with one click. After the translation, you can connect a proofreader to your project and manually correct any inaccuracies or contextual errors that may arise in translated templates.

Translation using XLS and JSON files

This method is preferable if you work with translation agencies and various vendors. You don’t need to grant access to your Stripo projects or a team member’s rights to a third-party vendor to manually translate your emails using an editor. This may be inconvenient, or you might want to keep some information in your emails confidential.

Instead, you can download an XLS or JSON file of the email containing only the text, provide these files to the vendor, and they will edit and add translations to these files, which are easy and intuitive to edit, requiring no technical knowledge. Once this is done, you can upload translated files to your templates and all edits will be automatically uploaded as well.

Preparations before translating

Before you start translating emails in Stripo, you need to take some preparatory steps, namely, configure the necessary settings. This is necessary to ensure the translation process runs smoothly and that the interface only displays the languages ​​you need.

The language settings we’ll show you below apply to both individual projects and the entire group.

In your account, go to Settings, then click Workspace, then click Projects & Groups and then go to the Localization tab. You’ll see this localization settings screen.

This is the default feature and enables the whole pack of translation features. You can turn it off if need be, but it’s not our goal today.

The next thing you need to set is your default languages. Click on the corresponding field to open an extensive list of languages you can choose from.

Then, you need to choose the languages you want to translate. You can do this the same way as with the default languages. Keep in mind that you can choose more than one language.

The last option is Vendor Translate, which allows you to add links to translation files in the editor. Please make sure to enable it. You can also choose more than one language here.

Now, your preparation stage is done, and you are ready to dive into the translation feature.

How to translate your emails with Stripo

This section is divided into two subsections, each dedicated to a different method for translating emails using Stripo.

1. Email translations using Google Translate

The fastest (and most basic) way to translate emails in Stripo is to use automatic translation within the editor. First, you need to click this button in the editor to call up a translation menu. 

In the menu, there will be two drop-down lists: one for default languages and another for translation languages. The settings you tweaked earlier are fully in action here, but for our example, we have a default English language for email and a Spanish/Ukrainian pair for translations.

If you need to change your default language, click on the three dots and pick the Change option.

The look of the option menu will change, showing that you can now click on the default language and pick the one you need from the dropdown list.

Let’s now move forward and continue our translation process. Even though our default languages are set, you can still add more to the list using a drop-down menu.

If you want to deselect translation languages, simply find them on this list and click on them again to remove them from your selection.

Once you’ve selected the languages, click on the tick buttons to accept your pick.

Then, the whole translation menu will change, marking that your selected translation languages are set and that you are ready to translate the template. You can still edit languages you want to use for your translations by clicking on the Add new language button. Deleting languages you don’t want to use is done by selecting the ones you want to remove (or deselect the ones you want to stay) by clicking on the tick bracket and then on the Delete button.

Now, let’s translate our email. Our languages are set, so all you have to do is click on the Translate button. After a few seconds, you’ll see this notification.

At first, it may seem that nothing has changed. But you are still looking at your default language template, so all you need to do is select a translated one. In this menu, click on the translated version you want to see. In our case, it’s Spanish. 

Important note: Once your email is translated, these tabs represent full-fledged translated template versions, so deleting them will delete the corresponding translated version.

Then, the translated template will be loaded. You’ll see a special marking (es, uk, etc.) that helps you identify the version by the name.

2. Email translations using Excel and JSON files

The other way you can translate your emails is by attaching translation files (either your own or from translation agencies). There are two file types: Excel and JSON. First, you need to pick this method by clicking on the drop-down menu in the Translate with section. You’ll see a menu where you can pick a preferred option.

Excel files

Once you pick this option, the whole menu changes, offering you an option to upload the file. For this option, you can download three types of Excel files:

• XLS;
• XLSX;
• XLSM.

First, you need to download the file of the template you want to translate. Just click on the Download the content button, and the XLS file will be saved on your device.

Open it with Excel, and here’s what it will look like. The first column is all of your English version content. The second and third columns are the Spanish and Ukrainian versions, but these are empty. All you need to do is enter translations into the corresponding cells.

To show you how this works, we manually translated one of the texts and entered it in the cell. You then need to save the file.

To upload the file, just click on the Drag & Drop Files Here and choose your translation’s XLS file. Once loaded, you’ll see this message.

All you have to do is select the translated version, and you are done. Here’s our translated example. The phrase we translated manually and saved in the file successfully loaded to the separate Spanish template version.

Important note: The maximum size of your translation file can’t exceed 30MB.

JSON files

This type of file works in pretty much the same way, except for a few nuances. Select JSON as your translation method and download the content of your template in the same way as with the Excel files.

Once it’s saved on your device, open it with Notepad. You’ll see something like this. Each segment of the email is separated with braces, and the corresponding uk and es lines (in your case, they will be different depending on the selected translation languages) are empty, awaiting translation.

Note: You can also open your JSON file with any code editor that supports creating and editing JSON files.

All you need to do is enter translations next to corresponding language versions, which is almost the same as to how things work with Excel files. Save the file once you’re done.

Uploading the file is the same for all cases, and this message will appear once it’s uploaded.

Choosing the translated version will reveal your efforts.

Important note: The maximum size of your translation file can’t exceed 30MB.

How to navigate and export your translated email versions

The more language versions of emails you create, the more difficult it can be to navigate through them all. While this may seem daunting at first glance, Stripo has taken care of this, too. Each email you translate is marked with a special icon in your account interface, indicating that it has language versions attached to it.

Clicking this icon will open a list of all the languages ​​you’ve translated this email into. Clicking on any language will open that version in the editor and allow you to work with it.

But what about exports? How can you export the exact language version you need? We have a solution for this.

If an email has language versions attached, the special button appears during export. Once you click on it, you’ll see a drop-down list with short language version names. By default, all versions are picked and exported.

Here’s where you can manage this. By clicking on the other versions, you can deselect them and leave only the primary one to export. Deselecting all of them always leaves only the primary version selected. Keep this in mind.

You can also choose different language versions for export on top of the primary one that is already selected.

However, if you need a specific language version to export, hover over it and click on the Only button.

Then, only this version will be selected and exported, ignoring the primary version.

Wrapping up

Translating and managing your localized emails is easy when you have the right tools at your disposal. And Stripo provides you with all the features you’ll need to create multilingual email campaigns without a hassle. Translate emails automatically, use third-party translation files from vendors, export the exact language versions you need, and manage your localized emails with ease. All these features will help you stay on top of foreign email marketing.