How Therabody scaled its global content while reducing translation costs by 60%

Overview 

Therabody, known for its innovative wellness products like the Theragun device, has seen rapid global expansion in recent years. As its products gained popularity worldwide, the need for high-quality, consistent translations became essential—covering everything from packaging and educational materials to marketing and websites. To meet this demand, the company required a streamlined, cost-effective solution to handle the growing volume of translated content while ensuring a seamless, cohesive brand experience for customers across different languages.

Challenge

The challenge as identified by Dominic Yeo, the Senior Program Manager of Localization, was to streamline translations, harnessing the many individual processes throughout the global organization that included multiple language service providers. Without a centralized translation management system or translation memory, the process had led to inconsistent quality and lengthy turnaround times. The manual process also incurred additional translation costs and made it difficult to meet internal deadlines.

In partnering with Smartling, Yeo was able to centralize the company’s localization efforts. His primary goals were to accelerate translation speed and reduce per-word costs while still delivering consistent, high-quality content to teams across Therabody. Smartling was selected as a key partner to help centralize and modernize their translation process to support these goals.

Solution

Smartling’s translation management system (TMS) gave the Therabody team immediate control over workflows, eliminating manual tasks like uploading and downloading files. The TMS also enabled the creation of a translation memory, which helped save costs through the reuse of translations and ensured greater content consistency. The absence of minimum fees and the ability to prioritize urgent projects made the localization team more agile, allowing them to respond quickly to time-sensitive demands.

Therabody also overhauled its translation strategy by incorporating machine translation and AI-Powered Human Translation (AIHT) into their workflow. They began replacing some human-only processes with AIHT, a solution that combines AI with human oversight to make translations faster and more cost-effective, particularly for materials like user manuals and packaging. Since AIHT delivers human-level quality, the outputs were used to train custom machine translation engines tailored to Therabody’s content. This allowed them to cost-effectively handle high-volume, long-tail translations while maintaining the brand’s voice, creative continuity, and consistency of consumer messaging throughout varied touchpoints. As a result, Therabody was able to translate content that had previously been left untranslated, broadening their localized customer experiences.

This new approach to translation enabled Therabody to scale its localization efforts, cut translation costs by 60%, and accelerate time to market—without compromising quality. The team is now looking for new opportunities to leverage these methods and further enhance their customer experience in local markets.