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Show HN: Globalize.now – translations that land in your pull request

Article news.ycombinator.com

Show HN: Globalize.now – translations that land in your pull request

Hi HN, I'm Arturs, cofounder of globalize.now.

Our view is that the best developer tools don't ask teams to change how they work. They show up where the work already happens. Dependabot doesn't make you log into a dependency dashboard; it opens a PR.

Localization mostly works the other way. A TMS brings its own dashboard, upload and download loops, review queues, and a sync step someone has to own. Liam and I spent years at Lokalise watching teams reshape their process around that. It fits a localization department. It doesn't fit a small team shipping daily.

So we built translation into the PR itself. Connect your GitHub repo, open a PR as usual, and we translate the new or changed strings, run QA checks, and commit the locale files to that same PR. The feature and its translations get reviewed and merged together, so nothing ships half-translated.

If you'd rather keep translations separate, pick a branch instead: every push to it gets its own translation PR.

Either way, files stay in your repo in your library's own format, so there's nothing to sync and nothing to migrate off.

This can look trivial. A GitHub Action that sends changed strings to an LLM is an afternoon's work, and plenty of you have built one. The afternoon version is where it starts, though. Keeping terminology consistent, not re-translating what hasn't changed, catching broken placeholders and plural forms, and not paying for the whole catalog on every push is the part that keeps needing attention. We'd rather own that so you don't have to. Glossaries, style guides and translation memory are built in, and they push the output toward what a good localization team would produce.

We run it on our own site, which is mostly long-form content (blog posts). Adding Japanese and Brazilian Portuguese (about 5,600 strings each) took 8 minutes and cost €31.

If your app isn't i18n-ready yet, an agent skill sets up the library, extracts hardcoded strings and connects the repo:

  npx skills add globalize-now/globalize-skills
Pricing starts at €5/month plus usage ~€0.15/1000 chars depending on size of glossary, style guide etc. No seats.

We think this "tool in the middle" pattern applies well beyond translation (e.g. accessibility fixes, docs drift, language consistency). We'd like to hear where you think it breaks down, and how it works for you in practice. Try it at https://globalize.now.

Discussion 0 comments · 4 points · artursvonda · 11h
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