Ecosystem | Workday's Transformative Custom Translation Integration
Workday's localization team faced a challenge most enterprise companies know well: a proprietary translation system that required linguists to spend up to five days onboarding, had no translation memory, and made scaling new languages nearly impossible. This session breaks down exactly how Workday partnered with Argos Multilingual and Phrase to completely transform their translation infrastructure, moving from 3.8 million words translated outside their legacy EXO system to over 300 million words flowing through a custom, API-driven localization pipeline.
The shift was not just a tool swap. Workday rebuilt their entire localization process from the ground up, externalizing UI strings from their proprietary EXO platform and routing all content through Phrase, a leading translation management system (TMS). This gave their team access to translation memory, machine translation (MT) support, and configurable multi-step workflows, resources that simply did not exist in their previous setup. The move also changed how linguists were compensated, shifting from hourly billing based on object counts to word-rate pricing, making project costs far more predictable and scalable across dozens of languages.
From the Phrase side, a proof-of-concept engagement included migrating existing translation memory assets, building customized training for multiple user types across regions, and establishing dedicated communication channels to keep implementation on track. Workday's engineering team went even further, leveraging Phrase's mature, API-first architecture to build custom add-on functionality, filtering rules, variable handling, and pipeline logic tailored to their specific content types.
Lucio Gutierrez, highlighted that scalability, flexibility, and speed were the three outcomes that no out-of-the-box solution could have delivered alone. The robust API set allowed Workday to serve multiple internal stakeholders, from product UI to content management systems, through a single standardized pipeline.
*What You'll Learn:*
Why Workday moved away from their proprietary EXO translation platform and what problems it was creating at scale
How Phrase's API-first architecture enabled Workday to build fully custom localization workflows
The real impact of migrating translation memory and why poor data migration can significantly increase localization costs
How shifting from hourly to word-rate pricing improved budget predictability across language programs
What a successful proof-of-concept engagement looks like when evaluating a new TMS partner
Key factors to assess when selecting a translation management system for enterprise localization
If you are evaluating translation management systems or planning a localization infrastructure overhaul, drop your biggest challenge in the comments below. We read every one.
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