Developers often struggle with how to quickly translate their cloud applications without having to hire professional translators and wait around for their translated resource bundles to be returned to them. Well IBM Bluemix has a great new service called Globalization Pipeline that lets you translate your applications in minutes without having to leave the Bluemix dashboard. The Globalization Pipeline service is a great time saver and enables you to rapidly reach out to new markets.

The most exciting aspect about the IBM Globalization Pipeline service is that it is fully integrated into IBM DevOps Services, so you can quickly invoke the service from the Build & Deploy tab in IBM DevOps Services. This lets you continuously build your application in the cloud and have your translation automatically updated whenever a change in your English resource bundles is detected.

For those developers that wish to manage their translations more granularly, you can manually upload your English resource files in the Globalization Pipeline service dashboard and then select the languages that you want your content translated into. When the translation is complete you can retrieve the translation through the service’s RESTful APIs, programming SDKs, or manually download the files from the service’s dashboard. The choice is completely up to you and enables you to support both static and dynamic forms of translation. Here are a links to the Java and Node.js SDKs.

As you use the Globalization Pipeline service you may wish to make edits and changes to the machine generated translations for things such as your company name and unique terminology used in your application. This is really simple to do in the Globalization Pipeline service. You can use the service’s dashboard to directly edit your translations and persist them in the cloud so you never have to worry about losing your edits. You also don’t have to worry about accidentally overwriting your edits when you translate new strings, as the service only retranslates English content that has changed.

I encourage you to go and checkout the Globalization Pipeline service and let us know what you think. Here is a link to a YouTube video to help you get started with using the service. We would love to hear about new features and functions you would like to see and how the service has helped you build globalized applications on Bluemix. If you run into trouble or just need a little help getting going with the service feel free to reach out to me and I can jumpstart you on your way.

To get started with the Globalization Pipeline service:

1. Select and bind the service to your Bluemix application just like any other service on Bluemix.
2. Once the service is bound to your application you can open the service’s dashboard and upload your resources or you can configure the service to automatically upload your resources from IBM DevOps Services.
   

   Globalization Pipeline Service Dashboard

   

   IBM DevOps Services Build and Deploy

3. After your content is translated you can retrieve the content dynamically using one of the SDKs or through the RESTful APIs. If you wish to have your content in a file, then you can download the file from the dashboard.

 

I hope this short blog post helps you get started with the Globalization Pipeline service and enables you to quickly reach the global market. For more information on the Globalization Pipeline service checkout the documentation.