CASE STUDY:
BODYBUILDING.COM
CASE STUDY:
BODYBUILDING.COM
SAJAN HELPS THE WORLD’S LARGEST ONLINE SPORTS NUTRITION COMPANY
BRING ITS E-COMMERCE STORE TO A NEW MARKET FOR THE FIRST TIME
Launching the e-commerce portion of the world’s largest sports nutrition and bodybuilding retail
website into a new market for the first time is no small feat—especially when technical challenges
arise. That’s what the team members at Bodybuilding.com faced when they took the first steps
toward introducing the online store to the Brazil market. They needed a translation company
with solid technical expertise to help them achieve their goal. Sajan’s localization engineering
and project management teams flexed their problem-solving muscle and rose to the challenge,
becoming an extension of the Bodybuilding.com team to roll out a strong solution.
About Bodybuilding.com
Bodybuilding.com is the world’s largest online sports nutrition store. Based in Boise, Idaho, U.S., it offers more than 11,500 health and fitness supplements and accessories, and ships to more than 155 countries. Bodybuilding.com helps more than
26 million people every month achieve their health, fitness and appearance goals
by offering over 35,000 pages of FREE information, including more than 25,000
articles and 10,000 videos, expert online trainers and new content added daily. For
more information please visit www.bodybuilding.com.
Translation scope:
•• Translate content into Brazilian Portuguese and localize the e-commerce
store section of the website for the Brazil market
•• Project requests come from four departments: marketing, online merchan dising, finance and customer service
•• Localization services include internationalization testing, pseudo- transla tion, pseudo-testing and international sufficiency testing, professional trans lation, localization engineering and localization testing
•• Translated over 600,000 words to date
•• Content types include website components, SKUs,
promotional and marketing materials, & product pages
The challenges
Prior to their partnership with Sajan, the teams at Bodybuilding.com had made some strides in adapting the e-commerce
site and marketing materials for United Kingdom customers in
their initial efforts to go global. But due to the complexity of
their website, they quickly realized they needed a technically
savvy localization services partner to help with internationalization testing and create an end-to-end localization process.
According to Carrie Fischer, Localization Program Manager at
Bodybuilding.com, she and her team were able to accomplish
a lot, but they eventually ran into challenges that held them
back.
For one thing, some of their file formats and content templates weren’t primed for localization. Another challenge concerned the inability to predict content volumes for translation. They constantly fluctuate every week due to frequently
changing vendors, products and even ingredients, and store
promotions get updated every two weeks—all of which requires a scalable partner.
“We couldn’t go as far as we wanted, and
that’s where Sajan came in,” said Fischer. “We
chose Sajan for their very apparent technical
expertise, which is a huge asset to us.”
The solution
Sajan’s localization engineering team got to work immediately
to expand Bodybuilding.com’s global presence. They became
an integral part of the extended Bodybuilding.com team, both
groups working closely together to implement the solution.
Dealing with Bodybuilding.com’s highly structured and format-rich content called for a unique approach that required
highly customized parsers. Sajan performed a lengthy pseudo-translation and internationalization testing phase to ensure that the site’s back-end fully supported the addition of
new languages and locales. They identified hard-coded strings
and other localizability and internationalization issues based
on reviewing the website and associated source files.
On the content translation front, Sajan dedicated a translation team that was very knowledgeable on Bodybuilding.
com’s product line to work closely with Bodybuilding.com’s
in-country team. This ensured appropriate product branding
and messaging for the Brazil market.
Sajan was also responsible for localizing the mobile store, which
required translation and testing of the mobile site across a
range of mobile platforms and products that closely replicated those devices used in the Brazilian market. Sajan worked
directly within Bodybuilding.com’s defect tracking system to
speed up the defect tracking and resolution process.
Sajan also established a team of in-country linguists to transcreate the online store’s product content to re- create the
informal and fun tone of the source copy into Brazilian Portuguese.
The impact
Since the Brazilian version of Bodybuilding.com’s online store
launched, user reviews have been very positive and sales are
expected to grow.
So far, Bodybuilding.com has translated over 600,000 words,
and their translation memory reuse rate continues to rise.
They’ve already seen 15 percent cost savings in just a short
time, and Fischer expects to see ever-growing revenue from
the Brazil market.
Today, Bodybuilding.com enjoys a streamlined translation
workflow. That is largely due to Sajan Transplicity, Sajan’s
translation management system, which supports the translation workflow by applying parsers that more easily manage
content that is written or assembled by Bodybuilding.com’s
vendors and customers.
Results snapshot
• Successful e-commerce
store launch in Brazil with
positive user experience
reported
• Faster translation workflow through automation
• Cost savings of 15 percent
over the translation investment
• Improved brand integrity
through quality-controlled
product content
“I would recommend Sajan to anyone, especially if they
require technical expertise,” Fischer said. “The team
effort has been great, with the Sajan Dublin office
demonstrating strong problem-solving skills. Everyone
we work with goes above and beyond for us every day.”
Ready to pump up your own global presence?
Contact us today to see what we can do for you.
Call us at 1-877-426-9505 or email us at solutions@sajan.com.
Learn more about Bodybuilding.com by calling them at
1-877-991-3411.
625 Whitetail Blvd.
River Falls, WI 54022
Sajan - North America
1-877-426-9505
solutions@sajan.com
www.sajan.com