On Lingo.dev, teams configure localization engines: Stateful translation APIs with glossaries, brand voice rules, per-locale model chains, and AI quality scoring, and then call them via API, CLI, CI/CD, or MCP.
Hey Product Hunt 👋
Thanks for hunting us. Excited to be here!
Two things changed at once in localization engineering
Teams are switching from legacy machine translation and translation vendors to LLMs. That part is visible. The invisible shift: LLMs without domain context don't localize, they just produce text that looks translated.
LLMs made translation fast. They also made it stateless.
Raw LLMs have no memory of previous decisions. The same term gets three different translations across the product. The results compound silently.
This is terminology drift. And it's the gap between translation and localization.
Translation converts text. Localization makes it consistent, domain-aware, and terminologically correct across every locale, every release. That gap is an engineering problem. And nobody had built the infrastructure for it.
Until lingo.dev v1.
What we learned from processing 200,000,000+ words:
We started at a hackathon in 2023. Won "Best DevTools." Spent 2024 building open-source localization tooling with select early users, design partners, customers, and our Discord community.
By 2025, we’d processed 200M+ words and teams at Mistral, Solana, SoSafe, and Cal.com were running localization through our infrastructure.
During this time, we learnt that every team hit the same wall. LLMs translated fast. But terminology drifted across releases. The model had no memory of previous decisions. Each request started from zero.
The missing piece was never better models. It was the context pipeline around the model.
The research that shaped this:
Recently, we published a study: retrieval augmented localization (RAL), injecting glossary terms into the LLM's context at inference time - reduced terminology errors 16.6–44.6% across five LLM providers and five European languages. 42,000+ quality judgments in our published research.
The finding that mattered most: Mistral models with a 72-term glossary approached Google Gemini's raw quality at a fraction of the per-token cost.
Turns out, Localization quality is a function of configuration, not model spend.
Read the research → https://lingo.dev/research/retri...
What v1.0 ships:
Teams create stateful localization engines on Lingo.dev, configure it once, and call it from anywhere:
- Glossaries: map source terms to target translations per locale pair, injected at inference time on every request
- Per-locale model chains: ranked fallback across providers; swap models between releases without touching a single glossary term
- Brand voice and instructions: define tone per locale, set rules for specific patterns (quotation marks, elision, spelling conventions)
- AI reviewers: one model translates, another scores by dimension; cross-model quality measurement at scale
- API, CLI, CI/CD, MCP: synchronous API, async jobs with webhook delivery, npx lingo.dev@latest run, GitHub integration that opens PRs with translations on every push.
Where this doesn't work:
One-off translations with no consistency requirements.
Teams that prefer human-led review workflows may find legacy platforms a better fit.
Try it today:
Create your first localization engine in under 3 minutes at https://lingo.dev/
Before we go, there are a few things we're genuinely curious about from this community:
1. If you've localized a product into 3+ languages, what broke first - speed, quality, or consistency? (We have a hypothesis, but I'd love to know your experience.)
2. If you're a developer who's tried wiring LLM translation into a CI/CD pipeline, what did you have to hack around that you wish was just... handled?
We've been building in public since 2023, first with select few users, then with our Github community, and now with you all.
Happy to go deep on the RAL research, the engine architecture, glossary injection mechanics, whatever's interesting.
Drop a comment or hit us directly!
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Very interesting. Whenever people asked us if we can support localization, I’d say no.
There was no way to make sure that we got it right.
Who’s testing for the accuracy of tone, style, and context?
Google Translate is a complete joke in some cases.
What subset of these issues does your platform solve?
Good stuff overall!
We have internal benchmarks and only after we pass strict standards do we roll out support for a language.
For tone, style and context, you can set it all up in one go and all your future translation requests retain complete context.
Give it a shot!
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Pricing is a bit confusing. Can you guys give any indication here or on your website?
Friendly feedback: pricing page is slightly broken on mobile (from iPhone and navigated from producthunt).
Brand voice rules and glossaries is the part most translation tools skip. How do you handle the conflict when brand voice wants formal but a locale prefers casual?
@ebazan33 brand voice gets preference as it is user defined and the best part is that you only need to set it up once.
Beyond that every subsequent translation request inherits all the context ensuring perfect consistency.
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@sumitsaurabh927 That's the right default. Most teams will fight that battle once and never want to think about it again. Curious if you let users override per-locale when there's a structural conflict (Japanese formality levels, German Sie/Du, etc.).
@sumitsaurabh927 That's the right approach. Most tools handwave this and let the LLM guess. Will read the docs. Good luck!
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I've used Lingo even before this version (v1) and specifically the compiler and engine. Both were super helpful and made the explicit use of I18n not needed. Despite having some bugs, it was totally worth it!
The team has worked super hard to refine and polish everything in v1.
Let me know how your usage goes!
Report
Congrats to the Lingo.dev team on the launch. I stumbled across it a while back and it’s been a genuinely great experience since then. Super smooth dev experience, very little friction, easy to drop into an existing workflow, and overall just feels thoughtfully built. Even the agents seem to enjoy using it. And of course, I’m quietly hoping the free tier stays around 😄
Replies
Lingo.dev
Lingo.dev
@lakshminath_dondeti Great questions!
We have internal benchmarks and only after we pass strict standards do we roll out support for a language.
For tone, style and context, you can set it all up in one go and all your future translation requests retain complete context.
Give it a shot!
Lingo.dev
@lakshminath_dondeti Thanks for bringing up the mobile view, will resolve soon.
What confused you about the pricing?
Tabstack by Mozilla
@Kilo Code, pay.sh by @Solana Foundation, now @Lingo.dev. packed week for the oss ecosystem! lfg
Lingo.dev
@fmerian Lessgo lessgo! 💪
Thanks for chiming in Flo!
Brand voice rules and glossaries is the part most translation tools skip. How do you handle the conflict when brand voice wants formal but a locale prefers casual?
Lingo.dev
@ebazan33 brand voice gets preference as it is user defined and the best part is that you only need to set it up once.
Beyond that every subsequent translation request inherits all the context ensuring perfect consistency.
@sumitsaurabh927 That's the right default. Most teams will fight that battle once and never want to think about it again. Curious if you let users override per-locale when there's a structural conflict (Japanese formality levels, German Sie/Du, etc.).
Lingo.dev
@ebazan33 Yes, we've a clear precedence hierarchy for this: https://lingo.dev/en/docs/platform/engines#how-the-layers-interact
@sumitsaurabh927 That's the right approach. Most tools handwave this and let the LLM guess. Will read the docs. Good luck!
I've used Lingo even before this version (v1) and specifically the compiler and engine. Both were super helpful and made the explicit use of I18n not needed. Despite having some bugs, it was totally worth it!
Lingo.dev
@medj Thanks for your continued usage!
The team has worked super hard to refine and polish everything in v1.
Let me know how your usage goes!
Congrats to the Lingo.dev team on the launch. I stumbled across it a while back and it’s been a genuinely great experience since then. Super smooth dev experience, very little friction, easy to drop into an existing workflow, and overall just feels thoughtfully built. Even the agents seem to enjoy using it. And of course, I’m quietly hoping the free tier stays around 😄
Lingo.dev
@mckean Thanks Christopher!
Haha, we're not touching the free tier. And in fact, you're only gonna get more as we add more to Lingo.dev
Super thankful for your cheerful comment and we're all super pumped to see how everyone uses v1 :)
It’s such a cool idea, how are you guys marketing this to build a userbase?
Lingo.dev
@manasse_hermans we’ve an active community of devs!
I've used Lingo even before when they named replexica, in short, I had a quite happy experience
Lingo.dev
@tawfekov wow that's a long time ago!
You should definitely try v1 :)
tambo
Lingo.dev is an amazing product. I remember going through localization at indeed and it was nightmare.
Lingo.dev
@mrmagan_ Thank you for your kind words. That nightmare no longer exists with Lingo.dev v1!