Ask HN: How to share texts and translations across mobile apps?
We currently support English, German, Spanish, Italian, and French as languages. We have an iOS, Android, and Windows Phone app, and an HTML/JS webapp. The three mobile apps are very similar. All have mostly the same screens and texts. Each app is done by a small team and features are developed for all apps in parallel. Quite a few texts are also used in the webapp.
We are now facing the problem of how to manage our (english) text strings and their translations. Right now, we have Google documents with tables that show screen drafts and their corresponding english texts and their translations. We coordinate the translation efforts by email and comments in the documents.
We were looking into translation tools (namely Transifex). We appreciate things like the translation memory, the glossary, and the easy integration into SW development workflows. But these tools do not fulfill two basic requirements we have:
1. Sharing the same texts (source language and translations) across all apps, so that if the source text or its translation changes, the change is propagated to all apps.
2. Grouping the texts by screens and showing the screen drafts while translating to give context to the developer.
Therefore we started thinking about whether we are actually looking more for a (text-) content management system with some translation support rather than just a translation tool.
So what shall we look for? How do other companies with similar requirements handle the situation?