How much do you care about localization?

The format diversity problem is solved by i18n-convert — converts between 32 formats offline:

i18n-convert strings.xml --to arb -o app_en.arb
i18n-convert en.json --to po -o en.pot

CLDR-aware plural mapping, placeholder syntax translation between formats. Free and open-source — no Localazy Professional tier needed.

For plural validation: i18n-validate checks CLDR completeness per language.

Install: npm install -g @i18n-agent/i18n-convert @i18n-agent/i18n-validate

Enough to build it in the beginning, because adding it later is going to be a pain 😅

I think that it's entirely dependant on the product you sell as well as the market expectations.

In a previous life I was the senior developer of an e-commerce agency handling north of 30 clients from all over the world. I had one client who had a business based in Pakistan selling western clothing to men and women. When he came to us with the project initially, localization is something that I brought up, but was informed that Pakistani people see English as higher class and so the website was to be entirely in English with predominantly white models (though there was a good helping of Asian (Korean/Chinese/Japanese) and black models but, ironically, nobody who looked South Asian).

For me at this stage, I mostly work in US markets and so localization is not a top priority but it will be when I expand.

One thing I will add is that, for developers, it's easier to start building with localization in mind as opposed to having to refactor to include it at a later date.

Localization is extremely important at a certain point in time. With floatingapps.net, I reached 15 million downloads worldwide (and earn decent money in the process) because I translated the app to 30+ languages. E.g., Japan is still the second-largest market after the US, but your app has to speak Japanese to even have a chance there.

People often think that English is enough but that's not true. Out of over 4 billion people online, only around 25% can speak English as their first or second language. Even in many western countries, people are more likely to buy products speaking their language and for more than half of them, the price is not as important as language support.

If you want to build a translation management service, don't do it. There are hundreds of them, many of them just small and single-purpose ones that are doomed already. I personally know several developers behind them. It's an impossible task for a single person.

It seems like there are two text boxes - one with the source text and the second for the translation. That's naive. And such a solution is not going to work for anybody for longer than just weeks or a few months.

As a founder of Localazy, I can assure you that it's quite a complex task. You have to support many different formats with many flaws and non-standard behavior, you need to detect changes and duplicates, you want to have assistive technologies and context tools for translators, you need to understand plurals, languages aliases, deprecated locales, platform-specific behavior, etc. We even have our own assistive and suggestion mechanism, parsers, exporters, etc.

Not even talking about users that want professional translation services to be part of the platform (we have them and it means a complex back-office management system and full-time localization manager).

We are working on Localazy for over 3 years now and it's still just the beginning.

If you have any questions, just ask. I will happily answer them.

I’ll give my personal opinion. I think it’s hard enough coming up with an idea, building it and deploying it and that’s before you even begin writing up content and marketing etc. I say this as someone who speaks two languages and who’s partner is from another country. Even between us we discussed the idea of doing a multiple language site and decided against it. It isn’t just double the work I think it’s more like two to the power of two more work. Unless our product was actively seeking to bridge two sets of people between those two counties I wouldn’t even consider it.

Keep it mind this doesn’t mean there isn’t an opportunity for you. Just for me, I can use English and reach a large enough demographic already ( most of the western world speaks English) so I ask myself why would I bother creating more work for myself?