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Ask HN: How do you translate your app?

10 pointsby hansyalmost 10 years ago
I'm in the process of translating portions of a web app of mine into multiple languages. I was wondering what sites/services some of you have used to help with the internationalization process.

7 comments

rahimnathwanialmost 10 years ago
Assuming your code base is already internationalized (strings are separated from code, you&#x27;re using libraries for things like plurals and number&#x2F;date formats), then localizing your app is mainly about maintaining translated versions of the strings.<p>Your choice of tool should probably be informed by whether or not you will use paid translators and&#x2F;or you hope that users will contribute some of the translations.<p>- If your users are passionate enough that you can get multiple users contributing&#x2F;checking translations for each language, then you could subscribe to CrowdIn or Transifex to host your strings. Your only cost will be the monthly fee.<p>- If you need to pay translators for some&#x2F;all language pairs, then you could use one of the platforms above, along with translators you find, or you could get a complete-ish service (platform + translations) from a single provider. ISTR both Smartling and Transifex do this.<p>In any case, think about:<p>- How often strings will change, and what you&#x27;ll do when they do<p>- How you&#x27;ll make sure that you don&#x27;t translate the same strings multiple times (and pay multiple times). Most platforms that also provide translation will also have a Translation Memory for this purpose.<p>- Whether and how you&#x27;ll check the quality of translation<p>- Whether you want to store the translation on your server (probably) or whether you want the translations served dynamically from a separate server (worth considering, IMO not worth it).<p>(I am a Product Manager at Google, working on our app translation service for Google Play developers. This service doesn&#x27;t cover your use case, and the opinions above are my own, not Google&#x27;s.)
bzalaskyalmost 10 years ago
I&#x27;ve used WebTranslateIt and i18next.js, and found i18n and l10n to be much easier than I&#x27;d anticipated. While I&#x27;ve primarily worked with actual translators, I think WebTranslateIt has some automated translation options as well.<p>- <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;webtranslateit.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;webtranslateit.com</a><p>- <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;i18next.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;i18next.com&#x2F;</a>
dmcy22almost 10 years ago
Check out Transifex: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.transifex.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.transifex.com&#x2F;</a>. We built it for developers. There&#x27;s an API and command-line client to make pushing&#x2F;pulling content easy. A lot of people also integrate Transifex with Jenkins or some other CI tool.<p>Disclosure: I work there.
jbrooksukalmost 10 years ago
We use CrowdIn, for Cachet. It&#x27;s pretty good and even suggests translations for you.
S4Malmost 10 years ago
I built a shitty CRUD web app with that links to a web form the texts I want to translate - stored in a database - and ask my friends who speak other languages to translate them.
gspyroualmost 10 years ago
I have used <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;gengo.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;gengo.com&#x2F;</a> for localization of mobile apps.
twundealmost 10 years ago
I use smartling at work. There are a host of similar services out there