Blacklake

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You can try Blacklake today. Contact us if you want to participate.

Blacklake is a modern linguistic data platform designed for today’s continuous, multi-system content environment. It’s built for teams who create, translate, and manage dynamic, multi-channel content.

Before setting up

Before you can connect you need to make sure that:

• You have received Blacklake credentials

Connecting

1. Navigate to Apps, and identify the Blacklake app. You can use search to find it.
2. Click Add Connection.
3. Name your connection for future reference e.g. ‘My Blacklake connection’.
4. Fill in the URL to your Blacklake server.
5. Fill in the accompanying Key.
6. Click Connect.

Actions

Content

• Prepare Content Prepare a file for translation by leveraging matching content from a lake and applying relevant variant assets. Advanced settings:
  • Source content ID: Specify the source content ID when your CMS stores translations without links to each other*.
  • Strategy ID: Select a leveraging strategy configured in your Blacklake.
• Store Content Store translated or monolingual content in a lake for future leveraging. Advanced settings:
  • Align with variant code: Align monolingual content with a source variant.
  • Source content ID: If you are storing monolingual content and aligning it*.

(*) The source content ID advanced setting is only required when your CMS stores translations without links to each other (Usually the case when localization is not a native feature of the TMS or folder level localization is used.).

There are two distinct scenarios in which the Store Content Action is used:

• Sending a translated file (first example below) will record the translation in Blacklake. It will store all the metadata and source units next to their translations. Applying the Lake after this action will repopulate the right units so that you significantly safe on translation cost.
• Sending a monolingual file (second example) will commit the file without any translation metadata, but will make changes to the target of translations if they exist. This enables you to synchronize any edits made outside of the translation process into Blacklake and enable “in-context editing”.

Metadata

• Update text metadata Update a text metadata value for a content variant.
• Update number metadata Update a number metadata value for a content variant.
• Update boolean metadata Update a boolean metadata value for a content variant.

Metadata can be used in leveraging to perform KPI-based content usage.

For more features, examples and FAQ see our docs.

Examples

Translation

The example above shows how Blacklake can be used in a translation process. Before translation, “Prepare Content” is used to diff and pre-translate content that already exists in the lake. It also adds relevant variant assets that subsequent steps can use.

After translation, and after the translation is uploaded to the source system, Blacklake uses the output of the upload action to commit the changes to the lake using the “Store Content” action. This makes the changes and all metadata generated during the translation process available for future use.

It’s important to use the output of the upload action because it can include additional source-system context, such as the new link of the uploaded content.

In context editing

The example above shows how changes in the source system to any content can be synchronized back into Blacklake. Implementation of this bird depends on the structure of the CMS. In Contentful, any change to any language triggers all languages to be republished. In a system like HubSpot, this is more language-dependent, so the bird shape will differ.

Feedback

Do you want to use this app or do you have feedback on our implementation? Reach out to us using the established channels or create an issue.