Show HN: I coded my own JSON translation tool to easily localize my side project

Hi HN, I’m Joan, the developer of Quicklang. I made this app to easily translate and keep in sync all my localization JSON files for my side projects. While searching online for a similar tool, I only found enterprise solutions that do not allow direct editing of JSON files.

I used to use ChatGPT to translate the JSON translation file changes before coding Quicklang. However, I realized that ChatGPT only allows you to input short content for translation into another language (even if you provide a .json file), and each time I had to request translations for one language at a time. So, I decided to build an app that only sends the changes I’ve made to the OpenAI API and easily translates them into all the target languages for my side projects.

Technical details: I used Next.js to build the front end and backend, and I use a custom VPS (EC2 instance) on AWS to handle the translation process. This is because the translation can take several minutes, and Vercel Functions time out after 10 seconds by default (up to 60 seconds on the Hobby plan). Finally, I save the translation files in an S3 bucket.

What’s next? I want to add cool features like change history, the capability to add context to the OpenAI API to make translations as accurate as possible, and maybe allow developers to interact with the API in order to use the tool.

Let me know your thoughts and feedback. It’s been a blast working on this so far, and I think it’s just neat :)

Show HN: I coded my own JSON translation tool to easily localize my side project
quicklang.app

There's a much easier way to translate json

    cat english.json | sed 's/"\([^"]*\)"/«\1»/g' > french.json

Hey!

Good approach, but I want to translate the strings on the JSON file from some source language (spanish for me) into any destination language.

So the JSON may be:

{ "hello": "Hola" }

If the destination language is "English" the result must be:

{ "hello": "Hello" }

Hey!

Thank you for your feedback! Quicklang is designed as a tool to synchronize and manage your JSON translation files centrally. For me, it’s good to have quick access for localizing my side projects efficiently and maintaining a changelog, among other features.

While there are several enterprise options available such as DeepL or Lokalise, they don’t quite fit my specific use case. ;)

Cool, nice product. Interesting to see that you've managed to get translations working on top of chatGPT, even for languages like Arabic! I decided not to support target language edits, because I felt it would make it much more difficult to keep languages in sync, when the source string is not always leading. How do you deal with this properly? Would love to have an automatic workflow that updates the json source file, as i18n tags are being added/removed from frontend files. For versioning; maybe just take advantage of the project's (git) versioning?