One of the selling points of Mendix is bringing the business and IT closer together in the process of application development. Having correct and consistent translations is an important part of good user experience and increases the success rate of user adoption.
Current situation:
The process today to translate the app is quite tedious and providing the translations is driven by the developers as business users in reality tend not to use the Mendix studio. Business is best suited to provide the correct and concise translations in the terminology they use - this is typically not done by developers. Working through Excel export and import takes a lot of time from the team to generate if the app is available in a dozen languages. When working in short sprints, new translations often lag behind development, potentially delaying the release of new features or negatively impacting the user experience for non-default language users.
Proposal:
Only work with the default language in Studio Pro and let all other translations be managed through the Mendix portal. Specific team roles in the Mendix portal would have access to the translatable elements of the app. This responsibility could then be given to the business without needing any interaction with Studio Pro. When building an app, the build process would generate the translation bundles and include them in the deployment package.
To further ideate, business users could receive automatic notifications (via email or the Mendix portal) whenever new translatable elements are committed, ensuring that translations remain up-to-date with new releases. This would eliminate the need for developers to be involved in tracking translation updates, further streamlining the process and freeing them up to work on development tasks.