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Show HN: Localize React apps without rewriting code

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Re: Show HN: Localize React apps without rewriting code

#71

Post by D_R_Farrell »

This is an ultra cool product - stoked someone is building this. We've internationalized our product using ChatGPT O-1 in the JSON files and it's been a real pain to try to decode the strings and otherwise for the text that is in the code.

Definitely going to ask my cofounder to look into implementing this.

- Are there other use cases for this tech besides language translation? Wondering if there are other eng problems that something like this could solve.

- Where are you guys thinking of taking this next? Seems like you're able to handle a lot of languages, so are you just continuing to refine the product or what's the plan for the next couple months and years?

Thanks for tackling this!

Re: Show HN: Localize React apps without rewriting code

#72

Post by makeitdouble »

maxpr wrote: post #52
makeitdouble wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I always wondered: why is your automatic translation better than the browser's or the user's own auto translation ? In particular, having it user side makes it fully opt-in, and the user has full control and will accept the quality as it is, whereas your service-side auto translate is your responsibility when shit hits the fan.

Historically, there are a couple of reasons why developers prefer to i18n their app instead of letting users do that. 1. PostHog has a great tool that lets developers "watch the video" of how users interact with their app's UI. Turns out, automated chrome plugins/built-in features often mess up the HTML so much that apps simply crash. I've seen devs adding translate="no" [0] in bulk to their apps because of this. The…

PostHog didn't cross my radar before, so it was an interesting discovery.

I am quite surprise the apps crashes on translation, but then there is a whole user action analytics engine running in parrallel, so it sounds like a problem of having too many things running at the same time ?

Companies that want high control on their translations have already the choice to straight translate their i18n strings, AI or not. That sound to me like a better choice and not much more onerous than the half-baked post filtering we're seeing in this article.

I'd argue if we're going the AI route, having it extract the user text and push it into i18n resources could be a better approach ?

Re: Show HN: Localize React apps without rewriting code

#73

Post by maelito »

maxpr wrote: post #18
maelito wrote: post #7

This is exactly what I was looking for to translate cartes.app, an open-source alternative to Google maps. Thank you, I'll try.

woah, i like this domain name! I bet it cost you a fortune :)

No, almost nothing. Map.app is 9 million € though.

Re: Show HN: Localize React apps without rewriting code

#74

Post by tough »

makeitdouble wrote: post #72
maxpr wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Historically, there are a couple of reasons why developers prefer to i18n their app instead of letting users do that. 1. PostHog has a great tool that lets developers "watch the video" of how users interact with their app's UI. Turns out, automated chrome plugins/built-in features often mess up the HTML so much that apps simply crash. I've seen devs adding translate="no" [0] in bulk to their apps because of this. The…

PostHog didn't cross my radar before, so it was an interesting discovery. I am quite surprise the apps crashes on translation, but then there is a whole user action analytics engine running in parrallel, so it sounds like a problem of having too many things running at the same time ? Companies that want high control on their translations have already the choice to straight translate their i18n strings, AI or not. Tha…

posthog is just one of many ways to record a user's session.

the problem is if you have the user running browser extensions which modify the client code from the users' POV. they are also now mangled and not in the standard expected format by those session recording utils.

tbh sounds like it would be a small enough number of users on a big pool it wouldn't matter much in real case scenarios to me

Re: Show HN: Localize React apps without rewriting code

#75

Post by bobblywobbles »

splix wrote: post #19

I'm trying to understand if it works with an Electron (or Tauri) app on desktop? Cannot find any mention on the website. And how it works with apps that are not bases on React Router or anything similar, so it cannot learn all the possible screens.

I solved this in a repository I made a few years back. By switching languages, .missing.json files are generated with the words that don't have the other-language equivalent. Then, you run this script which calls the google translate API to generate the translations. https://github.com/reZach/secure-electron-template/blob/mast...

Granted, it still suffers that it's not a human translator, but it doesn't require a LLM.

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