Case Study: Scratch, the world’s largest coding community for children, achieves 100% faster localized content releases and improved translator collaboration with Transifex

Scratch Accelerates Localized Content Releases By 100% And Improves Translators’ Collaboration

Scratch is the world’s largest coding community for children, used by about 200 million kids annually and supported by the Scratch Foundation and 1,000 volunteer translators. The team struggled with fragmented, manually maintained translator lists, poor communication and collaboration, fragile handling of mixed file formats (PO and key-value JSON), and lack of contextual information for strings, which made localization slow and error-prone.

Using Transifex, Scratch centralized communications, added announcements, string tagging and contextual notes, and integrated localization with GitHub and Slack via the Transifex API. Translation Memory and a glossary preserved prior translations for Scratch 3.0 and reduced errors, enabling weekly translation releases (up from monthly), faster QA, 20 new languages in two years, expanded localization across apps and educator resources, a 25% rise in non-English users, and nearly 70% higher usage among those users.

Scratch

Chris Garrity

Localization Lead and Senior Software Engineer