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by codingdave 2513 days ago
I like the idea, but you are putting more weight behind the tooling than I would. I don't find translation tooling to be cumbersome, so especially if machine translations are free, I don't find the price point for human translations to be compelling.

What would be compelling is if you could pro-actively call out the bigger gotchas in translation - grammatical differences that make you change word orders, different mechanism for handling plurals, etc. If you could preemptively warn us, even before a "push" that we may hit a problem, I'd take a closer look. For example, flagging a line saying, "Hey, it looks like you are using phrasing that will be problematic in <Italian/Hindi/Russian/etc.> Here's why..."
2 comments
abhisiv 2513 days ago
Great point, we would like to add support for common gotchas. Right now we abstract all plural logic away from the user by automatically requesting all plural forms of a phrase for each language. We also have noticed that translations often break layouts so we are pushing a tool that notifies you when translations are x% longer or shorter than the original string.

We would love to explore more ways we could help pro-actively solve these problems. Ping me at abhi@langapi.co if you want to talk more!

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mkycl 2512 days ago
Mozilla’s Fluent project [1] seems like a really thoughtful and comprehensive approach to many of these problems.

[1] https://projectfluent.org/

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abhisiv 2512 days ago
We analyzed fluent when we built the product and found that it didn't offer much more than the international standard ICU. Our platforms have full support for ICU syntax including plurals.
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