The Scenario
You are a content manager. Your team has 200 English product description snippets in a Google Sheet, column A. You need Spanish machine-translated drafts in column B before the end of the day so the Spanish translation team can start their review pass tomorrow morning.
The snippets are live product copy, not test strings. The machine translation quality matters, even for a first pass. Crowdin's MT engine has been configured with the vendor your team prefers.
The slow version:
- Open Crowdin's machine translation section
- Paste the first snippet, select Spanish, click Translate
- Copy the result, paste it into column B
- Repeat 200 times
- Realize at snippet 80 that you have been translating with the wrong MT engine
- The translation team gets the file an hour late and their review session runs into the next meeting.
The fast version is one prompt.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent inside your spreadsheet that reads the English strings and calls Crowdin's machine translation for each one, writing the Spanish results back into column B without you ever touching Crowdin's UI.
Open the SheetXAI sidebar and type:
Use Crowdin machine translation to translate each English string in column A to Spanish and write the translated text to column B. If any string fails to translate, write the error message to column B instead so I can fix it manually.
SheetXAI iterates through all 200 rows, calls Crowdin's MT engine for each, and writes the results into column B. The translation team has their draft file before end of day.
What You Get
200 machine-translated Spanish drafts in column B:
- Spanish draft — one per English string in column A
- Error message if any string fails to translate
- Column A untouched — source strings preserved exactly as they were
The error visibility matters. If three snippets have unsupported characters or exceed the MT engine's character limit, column B tells you which ones. You fix those three manually and the other 197 are ready to go.
The translation team gets a complete column B, not a patchy one with blanks they have to hunt for.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
MT workflows for product copy have more variation than simple translation jobs.
When the snippets need to be translated into multiple languages, not just Spanish
You actually need Spanish, French, and German drafts. Each language gets its own column.
Use Crowdin machine translation to translate each English string in column A into Spanish, French, and German. Write Spanish to column B, French to column C, and German to column D. If any string fails for a specific language, write the error message to that column.
When some rows should be skipped because they are already translated
Column B already has translations for the first fifty rows from a previous run. You only want to fill in the blanks.
Use Crowdin machine translation to translate each English string in column A to Spanish. Skip any row where column B already has a value. Write the Spanish translation into column B only for rows where column B is currently empty.
When the strings contain placeholders that should not be translated
Some snippets have {{product_name}} or {{price}} placeholders that must be preserved exactly.
Use Crowdin machine translation to translate each English string in column A to Spanish. Before translating, identify any text in double curly braces and preserve it exactly in the output. Write the translated text with the placeholders intact to column B.
When you need the MT drafts plus a quality score to help prioritize the human review
The translation team wants to focus their review time on the lowest-confidence MT outputs first.
Use Crowdin machine translation to translate each English string in column A to Spanish and write the translation to column B. If the MT engine returns a confidence score, write it to column C. Sort the rows by confidence score ascending so the lowest-confidence translations are at the top for the reviewer to prioritize.
The pattern: the column of English source strings goes in, the column of Spanish drafts comes back, and the reviewer knows exactly where to focus their attention.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open any sheet with English strings in column A, then ask it to machine-translate them to Spanish using Crowdin. The Crowdin integration is included in every SheetXAI plan. For related workflows, see how to bulk-add source strings to Crowdin or the Crowdin in Google Sheets overview.