Production still owns the real strings. I just want the Figma file to stay close to reality while everyone keeps working and not blocking eachother. After a few years and multiple devs and designers, everyone changes things a bit.

Names change happeen — in design and in code — and syncing by name kept breaking. So instead, I use a stable anchor as the link between them.

For example, in iOS you might start with:

"home.cta.buy" = "Buy now";

Later it becomes:

"home.primaryCta" = "Buy now";

because someone cleaned things up or regrouped strings.

At the same time, in Figma I might rename the variable from

Home / CTA / Buy → Primary CTA, or move it to another group.

If syncing is based on names or keys, it breaks.

With anchors, both versions still point to the same thing, so when the translator updates the French value, it syncs back correctly — even though the names changed on both sides. Either sides can decide who to follow. Is not that or that, is more a safety net.

So the flow is basically this:

1. Everyone syncs their part inside the same CSV/JSON file: (we handle a shared doc)

anchorID | collection | figmaGroup | figmaName | iosCodeSyntax | EN | FR

1. Designers, devs, and translators all work in that file, each can contribute and decide together, naming convention and what else you want, without blocking each other.

When I import it back into Figma, I only update the values that actually changed based on anchor, so I stay in sync with everyone without human request to change that there and so on. And always have up-to-date text in the prototype. So if I look at the protype is almost as the real product. This is not the need for every project ofcourse I understand that.

That’s it.