Surventis develops automotive coatings and surface treatment solutions. Its Refinity platform brings digital color management, business tools, and training together for automotive refinish professionals. Body shops use these capabilities to support their daily operations.
That breadth creates an ongoing localization requirement. As the product evolves, the team needs to manage language coverage across the application and its supporting experiences.
Before adopting Localize, the Refinity team had built its own translation system using Microsoft Azure Cognitive Services. The process consumed too much of the development team’s time.
Refinity already supported more than 45 languages when the team began onboarding with Localize in 2023. Its requirements extended beyond generating translations: the team wanted to carry existing work into new projects and coordinate terminology across applications managed by different people. Establishing administrator responsibilities and translator workflows was part of that work.
Refinity’s legacy application referenced translations through phrase identifiers. Moving to Localize required the team to decide which parts of the application would continue using that system and which were ready to migrate.
Existing reviewed translations needed to remain useful. Content still managed by the legacy system needed clear boundaries. The team also had to control phrase detection so that personal information and content from external systems stayed outside the translation workflow.
A phased migration gave the team a way to manage those dependencies. It also required careful implementation and testing as each page moved into Localize.
The team’s migration approach begins with importing existing reviewed translations into Localize. Sections that still depend on the legacy system remain excluded from Localize translation.
As a page becomes ready, developers remove those exclusions, update the application code, and check that Localize captures the intended phrases. Changes pass through development and testing environments before reaching production.
Defined Variables and Content Blockers support more precise handling of application content. These controls help the team distinguish text that needs translation from variable values and content that should remain outside detection.
The work also involves the people responsible for maintaining translations. Localize’s Customer Success team supported translator training and held recurring working sessions with the Refinity team to address implementation questions. Account records identify the Refinity application, release notes, and shop among the experiences using Localize.
Thanks to Localize, Surventis now has 50 active languages and 17,378 active phrases across the Surventis account.
Behind those figures is a working migration approach: the team can bring reviewed translations into Localize, retain the legacy system where needed, and move individual pages through testing into production. Localization now spans multiple Refinity experiences, with ongoing collaboration between product, engineering, and translation teams.
The team is also developing an API-based approach to localized email templates and exploring workflows for license agreements, service agreements, and privacy documentation. These initiatives represent the next stage of its localization work.
Refinity’s experience shows the practical work behind changing localization systems in a mature application. Teams need to know which system owns each section, which translations they can reuse, and what must pass testing before release.
For Surventis, those decisions shaped a gradual move toward Localize while accommodating the application’s existing architecture. The approach offers a useful starting point for teams whose multilingual products have outgrown an in-house translation workflow.
Planning a move from in-house localization? Talk to one of our Localize experts about your existing translations, application requirements, and rollout plan.
