Localization of UI texts

Background:

Sendbird Desk is a customer support product that provides live chat between customers and agents. Users can monitor and analyze tickets and agents through performance reports, real-time statistics, and assignment logs on the dashboard. Sendbird Desk provides both docs user guide and dashboard for users. The dashboard has always been written in English for all customers. However, there was a request from Woowa Brothers, a Korean mobile food delivery platform, to provide the dashboard in Korean.

My tasks:

The technical writing team and I decided to add a feature flag that turns on Korean language for general application settings and all of Desk product. Since Woowa Brothers became our customer in 2020, we’ve been updating and working on both Korean and English UI texts for all new features.

Application menu

Since the Overview, Users, and Settings pages apply to all products, we decided to provide the three main menu names under Application in Korean.

Settings

Under Settings, there’s a dropdown menu for Application and each product. We provide localization for Desk settings and Desk features only.

We used transliteration when converting feature names in English to Korean. For terms that our users are already familiar with such as bots, system message, teams, and tags, we decided to write them out phonetically in Korean. However, for ticket statuses and other general settings, we translated the terms to Korean.

Desk features

The following images show Desk-related data and features that are available for customers to monitor and utilize on the dashboard. We used a mix of transliteration and direct translation here as well when localizing the UI texts.