Havas Lynx Faze is a clinical trial recruitment agency launched by healthcare communications giant, Havas Lynx, in 2018.

The mission: to put patients at the heart of recruitment and retention, helping design trials that make them feel part of something vital and empowering. IQVIA Language Solutions has been working with Havas Lynx since 2014.

The Challenge

In July 2020, Havas Lynx Faze came to us to translate some recruitment advertisements they were putting together for a client. This is the kind of work we do every day, so we quickly got started with our usual processing and file preparation stages. At which point, we realized we had a problem. The files had been produced in an application called Figma, a tool that does not export into a single format suitable for translation.

To summarize, the challenges of this particular project were:

• Content had been produced in Figma
• Figma does not export any translatable formats

What IQVIA Language Solutions did

As this was a relatively small project and time was of the essence, we set about looking for existing solutions. Which is how we discovered the Figma Community, and the many plugins others have created to customize their use of the tool. In amongst the HTML, image, and wireframe tools, we found a handful of translation plugins, ready to use. Following all relevant due diligence, testing, and communication with the client, we got to work using these tools and managed to deliver our usual excellent quality. But the road to that delivery was not easy. Why? Because none of the existing plugins exported content in a format that allowed us to translate effectively. Every tool available lost the majority of formatting on export and import, and there was no information in the file to pull it back in. Some even exported the content in alphabetical order, rather than the order of the source file. This meant an exponential increase in DTP work, and manual referencing by the linguists, for whom the working file lacked essential context. Our review and quality assurance phases also had to be scaled up to check and correct any resulting human error. It was clear that this was not a process compatible with the way we work, and any future Figma projects would require careful thought.

It was the start of the following year when Havas Lynx Faze brought us another Figma project – this time much larger in scale. Having seen how many plugins had been developed for Figma on the first project, this time we decided to look into creating one ourselves. We found that Figma has an API interface that allows plugins to be made in JavaScript and integrated into the application. So, we made one! Within a short space of time, we had created a plugin that allowed content to be imported and exported complete with formatting for quick, efficient translation.

Outcomes

We were able to translate, with context and full formatting, and without the added DTP and QA load of our first experience. This meant reduced costs and timelines for the client – not only on this project, but on all their Figma-based projects going forward.

The Translation XML Text Export & Import plugin has been enhanced and improved over the intervening years, with more options for import and export, added instances, hidden text filters, and more. And because of how Figma operates, the plugin has been made available to other users too. The tool has integrations into Crowdin, Translate5, and memoQ translation platforms, and we have been using it regularly at IQVIA Language Solutions since V1.

If you or your team work with Figma and need guidance on the translation process, get in touch. If you are a developer interested in creating your own plugins, our team is always happy to share their wealth of knowledge.