Localization is invisible. Nobody opens an app and thinks "wow, great
translation infrastructure." They only notice when a button is cut off, a
date is wrong, or half the menu is suddenly in English again. It's
unglamorous work that quietly decides whether someone outside your own
language ever sticks with your tool.
Tabularis, our open-source database client, ships
in 8 languages today: English, Italian, Spanish, Chinese, French, German,
Japanese and Russian. Under the hood that's i18next and a folder of JSON
locale files (we're mid-migration to Lingui for the
runtime β more on why below). It works, but the contributor experience was
rough: if you wanted to help translate, you were editing raw JSON keys in a Git
diff, with no idea where each string actually shows up.
So we've decided to move our localization onto Tolgee,
who have also stepped up to back the project while we do it. To be clear: this
is the plan, not a shipped feature. The migration is ahead of us, not behind
us. More on the sponsorship below, but a sponsor only matters if the tool
underneath earns it, so here's the honest reasoning first, because it wasn't
the first result on Google.
It actually fits an open-source, privacy-first project
Tabularis is open source and built so it doesn't need an account or phone
home. Wiring a closed SaaS into the translation pipeline always felt slightly
at odds with that. Tolgee is open source and self-hostable, so the values
line up instead of fighting each other.
Context-rich translating is the real unlock
The feature that sold me: Tolgee shows translators each string with the
screen it belongs to, a screenshot of where it actually appears, rather
than a blind list of JSON keys. Context is everything in translation. "Open"
as a verb and "Open" as a status are the same four letters in English and
completely different words in German, Japanese or Russian. Seeing the string
where it lives is how you get good translations instead of merely literal
ones.
It isn't welded to our i18n library, which matters right now
We're mid-migration from i18next to Lingui for the
runtime: Lingui is ICU-native, with compile-time extraction and type-safe
macros, which is a cleaner foundation than hand-maintained i18next JSON keys. A
platform bolted to one specific library would be a liability mid-move. Tolgee
isn't, it manages strings as ICU messages and exports whatever the runtime
needs (i18next JSON today, Lingui catalogs as we cut over), so it removes
friction instead of becoming a third thing to migrate. And because Lingui is
ICU-native, it fits Tolgee's internal model more tightly than i18next ever did.
Going from 8 languages to "a lot more" becomes a throughput problem instead of
a daunting one.
The part we're really here for: community translations
This is what I'm most excited about. Community translations are on
Tolgee's own roadmap, tracked in
issue #1360, and we
want to use it. We're not building this ourselves; we're adopting
Tolgee now so that the moment the feature lands, the door opens.
The roadmap issue
describes almost exactly what we want: public projects, community members who
can propose translations, maintainers who review and merge, and a focused
"one string + a big screenshot" translate UI. Contributors get context, the
maintainer keeps a quality gate, and nobody touches Git.
How we see it rolling out:
- First, from the web. Pick your language, see what's missing, propose fixes in context. Maintainers review and merge. No clone, no JSON, no Git.
- Delivered over the air. With Tolgee's Content Delivery, an approved translation can reach you without waiting for the next app release. Every language still ships bundled in the app as an offline fallback, with no account and no API key in the build, but when you're online, improvements land on top.
- Eventually, in-app. The long-term goal: fix an awkward label right where you spotted it, inside Tabularis, and send it upstream. We're not there yet, because doing it while staying offline-first and account-free is the hard part, but that's the direction.
If you've ever wanted to see your favorite tool in your language and were put
off by the "submit a PR editing this JSON" barrier, that barrier is on its way
out.
Thanks
And the part I said I'd come back to: Tolgee is backing Tabularis. Not a
logo on a sponsors page, but real support for an independent, out-of-pocket
open-source project, which is what lets us do localization properly instead of
squeezing it between bug fixes. It's one thing to build good developer tools;
it's another to put your weight behind the people building open software with
them. The fact that they're open source themselves is exactly why it reads as a
fit and not a transaction. If you're shipping a multi-language app and still
hand-editing JSON, go take a look at what they've built.
Tabularis is free, open source, and already speaks 8 languages. Want it in
yours? Download it, switch the language in
settings, and tell us what reads wrong. Community translations are coming, and
when they land, your language is going to need you.
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