Connect Google Docs with Smartcat

Discover how to connect a Google Drive folder to Smartcat and establish a continuous localization flow for your Google Docs documents.

Google Docs is an online word processor included as part of the free, web-based Google Docs Editors suite. The integration between Smartcat and Google Docs enables localization managers to connect a Google Drive folder to Smartcat and create a continuous localization flow for the documents stored in that folder.

1. Pre-requisites

The only parameter required to set up the integration is the URL of the Google Drive folder that you want to connect to Smartcat. For best results, create a new Google Drive folder where you will be placing Google Docs ready to be translated and copy the URL of that folder.

2. Configuring the integration

To configure the Google Docs integration, log in to Smartcat and complete the following steps.

  1. Create a new integration project.

  2. In the Integrations tab, click Set up integration in the Google Docs integration tile.

3. Paste the URL of the target Google Drive folder.

  1. Click Sign in with Google. Select your Google Account and grant access to Smartcat.

As a part of initial integration setup, Smartcat will automatically import previous translations, populating the project translation memories (TM) and allowing you to reuse them in the future.

Smartcat will ensure that all the translatable content is available for translation as soon as possible, and that translations are pushed back into your CMS automatically, without having to monitor the process.

Specify the source and target languages and choose the appropriate workflow. You can safely ignore the rest of the parameters and click Translate.

3. Using the integration

If the integration is created successfully, the content of the folder whose URL you indicated in the settings is synchronized with the current Smartcat project and all the documents stored in the folder appear as Smartcat project documents.

After a document translation is completed, return to the integration settings, open the Settings tab, make sure that Push translations back is selected (default) and click Sync Now. The target documents will be pushed to Google Docs and appear in a separate folder in the same location where the original documents reside.

If new source segments were added to the integrated space since the previous sync, the Smartcat documents will be updated accordingly.

By default, a sync disregards incomplete translations. You can, however, instruct the integration to include them in every sync by enabling the option Publish incomplete documents.

For each source document Smartcat will create a folder with a _translations suffix and store the translated documents there.

Instead of explicitly performing sync by clicking Sync Now, you can schedule a sync at the required intervals. To do this, click on Do not repeat and select the appropriate option from the drop-down menu.