Matas is the leading personal care retailer in Denmark, with over 263 physical store locations and a well-established online presence. The Club Matas loyalty programme is used by over 1.8 million members.

The successful chain was originally established in 1949 as a chain of independent materialists which quickly grew in popularity and became a household name in Denmark.

In 2022 and with ever-growing customer demand for their products to be made available outside of Denmark, Matas identified a new opportunity to move into new expanding markets with their Nordic neighbours, Norway and Sweden.

This ambition was met with the challenge of translating the entire Danish website, app and thousands of product descriptions into two new languages. A goal was set to meet this new online demand by the start of 2023.

With an urgent need for a large quantity of high-quality translations to be done quickly, Matas turned to LanguageWire for technical localization solutions which included connecting their InRiver PIM system and CMS as well as providing machine translation.

The challenge

Matas required a full translation of the entire website including brand pages, product descriptions and articles within an ambitious deadline of only 6 months.  

This task would require the translation of over 1.5 million words on both their website and inside the Product Information System (PIM). Everything from long-form blog articles to small UX web elements needed to be translated in addition to thousands of product descriptions. 

While the large amount of content requiring translation and the short turnaround time presented the greatest challenge for the project, Matas also did not have enough internal validators to perform quality assurance on the translations at the start of the project. 

Matas chose to collaborate with LanguageWire to overcome these challenges and make the launch of their new website a success. 

The Solution

LanguageWire's innovative technology suite and access to a wide pool of language experts made meeting such a tight deadline a realistic possibility. 

All the translation requests were handled by LanguageWire's Platform using simple and easy to define workflows. This made the process of requesting a new translation and uploading source content quick and painless for all Matas employees who were new to the translation project management process. 

Lise Guldberg, the translation project lead at Matas, worked closely with her Customer Success Manager at LanguageWire to ensure that all the workflow templates created met the exact needs of their employees. Through this collaborative effort and the flexibility of LanguageWire's customisable workflows it quickly became much easier to automate and speed up the entire translation process.  

With a wide range of products needing translations, getting product information updated quickly and accurately while copying and pasting from spreadsheets was proving demanding. 

This was soon resolved by plugging LanguageWire's InRiver connector directly into the PIM solution at Matas allowing them to automatically receive translations inside the application with minimal effort on the part of their staff. This helped save time on every entry and helped to reduce the number of human errors made in transferring the content.   

The challenge of translating such a large quantity of source material in a short period of time was met with a technological solution in machine translation. By taking advantage of LanguageWire's post-edited machine translation services Matas were easily able to process around 500,000 translated words in two months. 

Such a large influx of newly translated words also meant a need for more rigorous control over the Matas term consistency in the Matas termbase. Additionally, LanguageWire was able to provide Matas with the linguistic expertise to provide the essential content validation in Swedish and Norwegian that was required prior to launch and until an in-house team could be onboarded.

The Results

The integration of LanguageWire's Connector for InRiver, has greatly enhanced the efficiency of handling multilingual communication projects. Creating significant improvements in time-to-market and resource savings.

A dedicated team of language experts, with specialized industry knowledge, ensures enhanced outcomes and instills trust in the accuracy and coherence of brand content translations across various languages.

Enhanced transparency with increased communication and expanded services from LanguageWire’s project management and expert linguistic teams for improved transparency, understanding and management of translation projects.

Despite a challenging outlook both Matas and LanguageWire rose to meet the demands of the project and ensured that Matas successfully launched into the Swedish and Norwegian markets on time. The new Matas websites launched in January 2023 with a fully translated site. Matas and LanguageWire continue to work in successful collaboration to meet the Danish retailer's ongoing translation needs.