How to automate app localization when your team only speaks English & Chinese?

Hey Product Hunt! 👋

Our team is hitting a classic scaling bottleneck, and we need some technical advice and tool recommendations from fellow makers who have taken their apps global.

Right now, our core team only has English and Chinese language talent. Our product is English-only, but we’re starting to see strong organic interest from non-English speaking markets like Japan and Russia.

We want to prioritize using AI or platform automation for localization, but we are terrified of translation accuracy and the heavy engineering required to proofread everything. For our marketing videos on YouTube and Facebook, the experience is incredibly seamless—we just provide our English subtitle files, and the platforms handle the multi-language translations automatically. What we love most about this is that users trust platform-level translations more, which naturally shields us from user complaints if a translation error slips through.

However, we haven’t found an equivalent, seamless automated workflow inside the app itself for UI strings and App Store/Google Play listings. We are trying to find a smart tech stack or Localization Management System (LMS) that can automate this pipeline without making us manually manage hundreds of messy spreadsheets.

• Are there any automated localization tools or platforms that work similarly to YouTube's caption translation but for mobile/web app UI strings and store metadata?

• How do you handle automated multi-language workflows on a budget without ruining the user experience?

• For teams who relies on automated translation platforms, how do you handle the quality assurance and proofreading phase without hiring translation agencies?

Would love to hear your tech stacks, automated pipelines, and success stories. Let’s chat! 🚀