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About the Group
Hoogendoorn Growth Management is a Dutch horticulture technology company founded in 1953 and headquartered in Rotterdam. Hoogendoorn develops climate control, irrigation, and crop management systems for professional greenhouse growers worldwide. Its software platforms — iSii and 24Aqua — are used by growers to monitor and automate greenhouse climate, water, energy, and crop data in real time. Hoogendoorn operates across Europe, the Middle East, Asia, Latin America, and beyond.
LetsGrow.com is Hoogendoorn's data intelligence platform — a web-based system that enables growers to collect, analyse, and benchmark crop and climate data across multiple locations and systems.
Dalsem is a specialist in turnkey greenhouse construction and engineering projects, delivering complete climate-controlled growing environments to clients across the Middle East, Asia, Russia, and Europe. Dalsem projects range from individual commercial greenhouses to large-scale national food security installations.
All three companies operate within the same horticulture technology ecosystem and have been served by Alafranga as part of a single, evolving localisation programme.
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▮How It Started
Alafranga's relationship with Hoogendoorn began in 2010 — with Turkish.
Hoogendoorn was expanding into Turkish-speaking markets and needed their software and documentation localised. Turkish was the logical entry point: Turkey is one of the world's leading greenhouse production markets, with significant commercial greenhouse operations in Antalya, Mersin, and the Aegean coast.
The first Turkish project was delivered cleanly. A second followed. Then requests for French, Spanish, Chinese, and Arabic came in — reflecting Hoogendoorn's expanding global footprint. Over the following years, the programme grew to cover more than 12 languages and three companies within the group.
Volkan Güvenç visited Hoogendoorn's Rotterdam office during the partnership — a relationship that extended well beyond remote project delivery into direct collaboration with product and engineering teams.
▮Software Localisation: iSii, 24Aqua, and LetsGrow
The largest and most technically demanding component of the programme was software localisation via Passolo, the specialist tool for software string management.
iSii — Hoogendoorn's primary greenhouse climate and process control software. Multiple version releases localised across the programme, covering UI strings, alarm texts, tooltip content, process descriptions, and control logic terminology. Languages included French, Spanish, Chinese, Arabic, Russian, German, Korean, Japanese, Czech, and Turkish.
24Aqua — Hoogendoorn's irrigation and water management platform. Localised into Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, French, Arabic, and further languages, with successive version updates maintained across product generations.
LetsGrow.com — The data platform's software strings, database content, and web interface localised via Passolo into Chinese, Arabic, French, German, Russian, Spanish, Polish, and Japanese — with ongoing updates across platform releases.
Working with Passolo within the live software environment meant Alafranga's linguists handled content as it would appear to the end user — in context, within character constraints, with awareness of how UI strings interact with screen layouts and control flows. This is a meaningfully different discipline from document translation, and one that requires sustained familiarity with the product.
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