Show HN: Tolgee – developer-friendly localization tool

Software localization has been broken for years. That's why I created Tolgee.

Eight years ago, I worked in a company that was developing a not-so-small system for lawyers. And it was extremely painful for me as a developer to handle the localization of the app.

The process looked like this:

1. Add many keys to the code like "transport_form_name_input_label," "transport_form_car_input_label," etc.

2. Run some extractor to extract the keys from the code.

3. Open the target language data file in an app called Poeditor

4. Import the extracted keys.

5. Find and translate the new values - This was super painful since there were many untranslated keys, and it was hard to find the new ones.

6. Repeat from step 3 - we were translating to 2 versions of the Czech language because of different customer types.

The most common bug was forgetting some key untranslated because developers always kept this as the last part of the feature task.

Later on, we started to think about how to improve this process so the localization doesn't rely on developers.

However, we found out that designers, project managers, and product managers cannot work with Git, and it's also hard for them to find out which keys are rendered where in the system.

It was impossible to simply transfer the task to those.

So my idea was to enable them to simply click on the strings in the actual translated app, give them simple dialog, and let them translate it exactly in the place where it's rendered.

Four years later, I got to implement this idea as a part of my master's thesis, and later on, I founded Tolgee.

You can quickly deploy Tolgee app with Docker / Docker compose.

It’s fully open-source (Apache-2), we only have one enterprise folder on a different license.