Letting designers and translators meet in the middle: Figma → TMS without copy‑paste (2023)

Background

Design moved fast in Figma and content owners wanted early language feedback, but strings were still being copied into spreadsheets or pasted from screenshots. I wanted translators to see real context without asking designers to change how they worked.

Stakeholders: product/design, a web lead, a localisation PM, vendor PMs, and translators/reviewers for fr‑FR, de‑DE, pt‑BR, ja‑JP and zh‑CN.

What I built

An export step that pulled Figma text nodes with stable IDs, preserved component/variant paths as context, and mapped them to a clean package for the TMS; on the way back, the same IDs allowed a neat overlay so designers could see translated copy in place.

Rules that protected placeholders and kept inline markup out of the designers’ way, plus a tiny glossary overlay so decision‑heavy terms stayed consistent across screens.

How we ran it together

Design kept their flow; PMs launched translation from labelled frames; translators worked with screenshots and notes in one place; returns landed as overlays for a quick visual pass before hand‑off to engineering.

Outcome

Fewer context questions, fewer late layout changes, and earlier sign‑off on key flows. Designers saw where length mattered before engineering was involved.

If I were starting this today

I’d add a lightweight screenshot diff so we notice when a component changes and needs a quick re‑review in the target languages.