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

quicklang.app

21–30 of 36 posts

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

#22
post #20

>Perfect for manage project localization >This credits will never expire. >So if you sync new o modified content There are obvious mistakes in the English version of your website, which is totally bizarre to me, since these errors are absent in the German version. My guess is that the AI actually fixed these errors when translating. I have to say that the German translation is really bad though. "Habe nach einem Onli…

I agree, the German translation is pretty bad (phrases like "Hier ist, was sie über Quicklang.", "Es ist ein Durcheinander. Sie wissen Bescheid.", and "Du kannst all meine Programmierprojekte auf X" are incomplete or awkward). It also doesn't sound like this can handle dynamic phrases like "buy {{count}} items"?

When you use machine translation, you must be aware that the fact that text is not in the original language does not necessarily mean that someone else speaking another language can understand it.

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

#23

>Perfect for manage project localization >This credits will never expire. >So if you sync new o modified content There are obvious mistakes in the English version of your website, which is totally bizarre to me, since these errors are absent in the German version. My guess is that the AI actually fixed these errors when translating. I have to say that the German translation is really bad though. "Habe nach einem Onli…

this is a perfect example of why AI prompting is important, even if people roll their eyes and tell you that using an LLM is “easy”. Clearly not.

Pro tip: If you are using an LLM to do translations for you, give it CONTEXT so that the translations are not garbage. Don’t just say “translate x into german”. Explain in sentence or two what it’s translating and who the audience is. Many words are translated differently depending on the context of the conversation.

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

#24

I've built a fairly sophisticated web-based translation tool for an agency's client who demanded it. I built it to their spec, for their CMS. They didn't use it, because the scheme they wanted turned out to be too much bother, and they couldn't find translation agencies who would bother with it. The reality is that if you want to make it easy to keep translations up-to-date, you actually have to support all the (conf…

Unless of course, you can ant to become the Uber of undercutting businesses for decades to capture the market then steadily raise your prices as you drive people out of work.

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

#25
If this for your side project and your just using machine translation anyways - if this saves you steps, go for it. When it comes down to an actual product, as a consumer, most would rather buy a product that's been proofread by someone for the language/region they use it in, quality can only improve. I'm not against bootstrapping translations with AI, but they are more than strings that serve functions, they are human language that evoke emotion and associations - proofreading is important to me in something I might have to pay for. And human language is super important sometimes, and most of us can really only think/feel in a singular one. If my language comes across wrong here, it will undermine my point.

I don't mean to be critical, sounds like something I could actually use occasionally. I sometimes feel like I'm the only one putting up this common sense fight: if designers can spend hours crafting something carefully worded, tailored in English for something, why would it make sense to just take that and auto-translate it into something that if it's wrong gets discovered in the market as some very awkward in-app experience where the words don't make sense so much someone complains? My only gripe is people thinking AI is the total substitute for localization, it's not a silver bullet, but sure is better than nothing.

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

#26

>Perfect for manage project localization >This credits will never expire. >So if you sync new o modified content There are obvious mistakes in the English version of your website, which is totally bizarre to me, since these errors are absent in the German version. My guess is that the AI actually fixed these errors when translating. I have to say that the German translation is really bad though. "Habe nach einem Onli…

[deleted]

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

#27
plugging my own project:

https://github.com/KevinColemanInc/i18n-translate-go

Works well for i18njs. The issues I ran into are: chat-gpt didn't translate all the keys in the batch (especially for obscure languages like Laos) and sometimes the chatgpt output invalid unicode (see error in the readme).

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

#28
post #27

plugging my own project: https://github.com/KevinColemanInc/i18n-translate-go Works well for i18njs. The issues I ran into are: chat-gpt didn't translate all the keys in the batch (especially for obscure languages like Laos) and sometimes the chatgpt output invalid unicode (see error in the readme).

Hey! I ran into the same issues. In order to fix the invalid output you can specify to ChatGPT that you want to recieve the response as a JSON formatted text.

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

#30
Disclaimer: I'm the tech co-founder at https://replexica.com.

I like the idea.

At Replexica we've basically built a better + much faster (+ sometimes cheaper) alternative to Lokalise, Phrase, and Crowdin (we help dev teams do AI translations of user interfaces - web, mobile, Apple Vision Pro, etc.). So having seen some things, I must say AI-powered localization is indeed the future, but it's very, very hard to get it right.

For example, it took us a while to perfect the quality. Working with the "industry standard" scores (BLEU, etc.) isn't easy, and the state of the machine translation industry feels very last century, so you have to oftentimes invent things by studying the latest research.

It's a constant quest to ensure the user gets the best, perfect result, and not to mention, different LLMs perform differently with different language pairs, which adds an extra challenge to maintaining accuracy while iterating. For example, we had to build a regression testing setup internally, to make sure the quality only improves as we ship.

Nevertheless, good luck. I will be keeping an eye on your progress.

BTW, loving your domain name.

EDIT: typos

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