What is LocoLingua?

First, Some Background

The Internet is a world wide web catering to a tiny fraction of its populace.

According to some statistics, the Internet is made of approximately 49.6% English content. While those estimates are hard to trust completely (measuring the entirety of the Internet is a difficult task), it nevertheless points to a startling issue. If roughly half the Internet is in English, and only approximately 5% of the world speaks English natively, then 95% of the world has two options. They are either limited to the small corner of the Internet they understand, or they have awkward, friction-filled interactions with context-less translations. Or, they have those same awkward misunderstandings with the original English content if they happen to speak English as a second language.

Then we consider developers and companies who want to translate their web apps for customers. They can either spend thousands of dollars and wait weeks for a professional translation services company to catch up to the rapidly changing source text, or spend dozens to hundreds of expensive developer hours each year copy-pasting from their code to Google Translate and back - while hoping that the translations captured the right context.

This is an over-simplification, but one that is not far off. Even with Google Translate built into browsers to translate some pages automatically, you end up with incorrect translations that you have no control over when your customers point them out to you.

This is why we created LocoLingua. Making translation cheaper, faster, and more accurate means more users around the globe will be using web applications and reading websites in their native tongue. By meeting developers where they’re at in their code repositories we can solve the translation problem with a “set it and forget it” process while giving them full control of their translations in their code.

Does this matter?

Back in 2024, I was a full stack developer for a bilingual bulk e-commerce platform. The business’s goal was to connect US businesses to bulk manufacturers in Mexico. Doing so would ideally reduce shipping times and costs for US bulk buyers while providing greater economic growth and increased job opportunities to Mexican citizens. Since my employer was a small startup, I was often translating the frontend strings from English to Spanish manually.

Even though I spoke Spanish fluently as my second language, the context shifting required to meticulously translate every sentence we added to the frontend meticulously added a lot of friction to development. I was agonizing over word choice instead of fixing bugs and shipping features. It was all too easy to forget to translate a string, leaving half of our customer base confused and frustrated.

We could have saved countless hours and headaches with a tool like LocoLingua. It mattered a whole lot to us. I personally know of several businesses serving customers from different background just within the United States that would be eager to use this. So, two years later, my team and I are tackling it.

What is LocoLingua?

So, what are we doing about it?

We are building a CI/CD pipeline-integrated automatic frontend translation service. To begin we’ll just be supporting GitHub, but we plan to expand to GitLab and BitBucket in the future.

Here’s what the workflow looks like.

  1. Create an account with LocoLingua.
  2. Connect our GitHub app to your repository.
  3. Configure the frontend tech stack you use and the languages you want your app to be available in.
  4. Watch as we use your frontend’s native translation dictionary system to add all of these translations directly to your code.
  5. Every time your frontend text is updated in a PR, we update stale translations, add new ones, and remove unused ones.

That’s it! Five simple steps and you get all of your text translated. If you just want an initial pass you could disable the repository, but be warned - translations get out of date quickly.

With this simple process you can save thousands of dollars or get back hundreds of hours of developer time, while providing a better experience to your customers. If you have some native speakers on your team, they can simple update the translations directly in the code. If you want to leave our platform, the translations use a standardized format right in your source code repo - there’s absolutely no vendor lock-in.

Have any questions? Reach out to us on LinkedIn.