After 9 years of working in tech, we decided to go build our own projects full-time, hoping to ship a new product every month. We failed to make it work, however, we realized the importance of shortcuts when trying to get more users with limited resources.

Localization always seemed like such a shortcut: we felt we could’ve onboarded many more international customers who sign up but end up leaving because they couldn’t use them in their native language.

However, it really bothered us how much effort we needed to put into setting up localization using react-intl/lingui/react-i18next. It was annoying to extract translatable text from the code and then maintain translation dictionaries. We were also constantly prompt-engineering ChatGPT to produce accurate translations.

We made Replexica to automatically traverse React code and understand what needs translation, removing the need to extract strings from the code. That means, you don’t spend time maintaining JSON dictionaries and just focus on shipping features. You just need to plug in Replexica Compiler.

We’ve bundled Replexica API with a combination of several LLMs, to produce great translations. We’re using a prompt-engineered GPT-4 to extract the context of the product (e.g., from its website) and the “brand voice”. We’re also using a combination of Llama/GPT/Mixtral for translation. Also, the API spec is open, meaning every developer can build their own translation engine and self-host it.

Replexica works seamlessly with Next.js App Router. We’re considering adding support for Next.js Pages Router and Remix.js next. We’d love to hear your feature requests!

We opened our repo under the MIT license last week and launched the API. The goal is to not charge hobby and open-source projects. We make money by charging for higher usage volume and enterprise features like user permissions and support.

Give it a spin: https://github.com/replexica/replexica. Let us know what you think!