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Comment by lwouis | Hacker News Reader

Context-less translation can be done quite successfully these days with online services. You could simply make a few hundred calls to something like Google Translate and get good quality translations in multiple languages.

This is built-in some of the top software translating platforms to "seed" the initial translation. A bulk kickstart that can optionally later be refined by human translators.

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As someone in the localization business, let me assure you that, with the current state of the art, using machine translation without any kind of human post-editing for UI is a terrible idea.

That the UI is not in English does not mean that a non-English person will be able to understand it and use it successfully.

You can only do it if you do not have any kind of support for those international users and if those users are not your real customers but merely statistics in the usage dashboard of a free product.

Are there any off the shelf easy to use translation services where you just send in your xliff files or something and get it translated based on translation size/time taken by the translator? At my job, everything is pretty automated between translators and devs, but I imagine that's not very simple or easy for small devs/open source. I'm thinking xliff in particular would be the easiest format to work with since there are so many tools available for it.

Obviously, Google Translate is going to produce suboptimal translations, but it does have the big advantage of being easy to automate.

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