I think modern Japanese is LTR, but besides that - I believe the project you worked in the past solves an important problem.

Besides pluralization (and e.g. Arabic having 6 forms zero/one/two/few/many/other), turned out number internationalization and currency conversion are big next challenges the community wants to address next.

> create ICU compliant JSON.

I think this is an excellent idea. I have a feeling in the future we will need ICU v2.0, sort of, but unfortunately it's an extremely hard problem and the probability to fail is pretty high (looks like project fluent is not actively maintained anymore: https://github.com/projectfluent/fluent)

> half-assed translation that was obviously made by a machine

That's exactly what we want to solve.

Here's the thing:

It turned out, AI translates better than humans when provided with enough correct context. Both macro context, like what the product does, and micro context, like what the component represents on screen and how it relates to other components.

As a result, algorithms extract the needed contextual hints, and a correctly configured LLM model finishes the rest.

And just say "sorry" to all the people asking you for translation of your great product ?

Would you literally rather have nothing than a poor translation?

Perhaps I could've communicated this better, but we've built Lingo.dev Compiler for web apps and user interfaces, not for technical/professional content.

And since we had to exclude certain terms like "Lingo.dev Compiler" itself from i18n, we've shipped support for data-lingo-skip and data-lingo-override-<locale-code> as well.

Regarding using LLMs for production content localization, I recommend checking out how Reddit translates their entire user-generated content base in 35 languages using AI:

https://techcrunch.com/2024/09/25/reddit-is-bringing-ai-powe...

If it already works great for Reddit today, I believe it's safe to assume it will become accessible to the wider audience soon as well.

Thanks! =)

> localization is far from just translating the text

For sure, that's spot on.

What I'm excited about the most is that linguistic/cultural aspects are close to being solved by LLMs, including Gemini 2.5 that's got a huge performance boost vs the previous iteration. So, the automated approaches make more sense now, and have a chance of becoming the default, reducing i18n maintenance down to zero - and as a dev I can't be not excited about that.

P.S. fbt is great by the way, as is the team behind it. It's a shame it's archived on GitHub and isn't actively maintained anymore.

Thanks for the perspective!

We support larger org workflows with the Lingo.dev Engine product, but that's not the point: Lingo.dev Compiler is unrelated to that, 100% free and open source.

We started with a thought - what if i18n is actually meant to be build-time, LLM-powered, and that's enough for it to be precise? Not today, but in the future, it feels like this type of solution could elegantly solve i18n at scale, in software, as opposed to the existing sophisticated workflows.

WDYT?

Hey lukol, that's an exciting problem to solve.

The best solution right now is prompt engineering: turns out, AI can be tuned to provide top quality results with the correct system prompt/few shot setup, and custom prompts can be provided in the compiler config.

Longer term, I want this to never be an issue, and I feel we'll get there together with the help from the open source community!

Sure Jjani, perhaps our docs could be slightly better! :)

Typically quality changes significantly with the right setup of translation fine-tuning settings, so send me a DM with your current setup and we'll help you out in a couple of minutes.

Alternatively, Lingo.dev CLI is open source and you can give it a try with your own API key/model, and if your preferred provider ID isn't yet supported - pull requests are welcome, let's add it! (adding new providers is pretty simple).

Checking your MCP scenario right now, but meanwhile regarding the keys: they're indeed important and are great ways to give the LLMs another tip regarding the meaning of the label and its intent.

Yep, Cursor indeed helps!

(Here's a battle tested prompt example we found working pretty nicely with claude o3 + claude 3.7: https://lingo.dev/cli/extract-keys)

> Then, you simply ask it to translate into other languages.

Yep! With Lingo.dev Compiler though, we were scratching our own itch, and particularly it was maintenance of the localized code. Turned out, extracting is fine, but then further down the road we found ourselves digging through the code and jumping back and forth between the code and i18n files.

I think it won't be a problem anymore after "Just In Time software" becomes a thing, and vibe coding tools seem to be getting us closer to that point.

Great example!

Exactly, this is a great direction!

We believe automatic discovery + i18n processing is the most natural next step for i18n on the web, since LLMs now exist.

And we feel that not only will industry standard i18n libraries like i18next or react-intl adopt it soon, but frameworks like next.js or remix.js themselves will make it one of their core features.

We originally built Lingo.dev Compiler scratching our own itch, but we're really excited to see how the industry will evolve from here!

Good point. There are JavaScript tools that do that for js devs, but since oftentimes you end up having <a>links</a> and <b>nested <i>elements</i></b> in the code, wrapping becomes problematic and hard to maintain at scale.

I think there's a chance compile-time, AST/CST solutions might be the ultimate, O(1) i18n approach that doesn't distract. Ideally it should come out of the box with the framework, but perhaps this future is a little bit too far away just yet.

Genuinely excited to read comments like yours. We started the project scratching our own itch, and are touched it resonated!

It will remain 100% free and open-source. We're already dogfooding it on our website and app, so if you'd like to join and contribute at some point, we'd be very happy!

With the community support we hope to support more platforms soon vs now, but I can confidently say that adding support for techs stacks using one of the following:

Vite Rollup webpack esbuild Rspack Rolldown Farm

should be reasonably straightforward, and we expect pull requests adding other setups soon.

That's a great question!

woah, i like this domain name! I bet it cost you a fortune :)

Thanks! To make it work predictably, we actually tested quite a few different algorithms before landing on one that produces outputs LLMs can reliably understand.

Conceptually, we're relying on common sense assumptions about how developers structure JSX. We assume you write reasonably semantic markup where the visual hierarchy matches the code structure - no CSS tricks that make the UI render completely different from what the JSX suggests.

This let us create translation boundaries that make intuitive sense to both developers and AI models.

Yep, localization is the best term here, but sometimes folks confuse it with other things, for example geo localization or localization of errors.

So we usually try to use both terms at the same time, often interchangeably, though translation is ultimately a subset of localization.

Ah yes good point - I think that was my fault. Localized now :)

I wouldn't expect there to be any.

Sometimes your presentation varies depending on the data, in ways that are ultimately Turing-complete. Any domain-specific-language is eventually going to grow to incorporate some kind of logic.

React seems to have found a sweet spot for that with JSX, which presents as if it's mostly HTML with some Javascript mixed in. (In reality, it's actually Javascript with HTML-esque syntactic sugar, but it works very hard to present the illusion.) That means that it's working in two well-understood and widely-supported languages, rather than creating yet another presentation language.

HTML+CSS has deep flaws as a presentation language, but it's also universal. I don't expect React to reinvent that particular wheel.

I believe tRPC could be a great solution to separate logic, generally speaking. However it also depends on what type of logic - some logic, like state/behaviour of the sidebar/modals will always remain client side.