We maintain quite a few Laravel applications for clients and being multilingual is often a key requirement for our clients. Sometimes because offering Swedish and English is essential here in Sweden, and other times because a global organization has people worldwide and wants to support them in their own languages.
Nothing can beat a professional translation (yet). Period. But we often find that the translation process holds us back when developing and adds vast costs.
Imagine an application with five languages rolling out a new feature that adds a handful of strings. Localization becomes a blocker, and we either:
- Have to accept longer release times.
- Have to accept an app that mixes english and local languages quite substantially.
Both solutions could be better. Enter Laravel Autotranslate and DeepL.
We like DeepL and have already integrated it for clients using our Company Cloud (WordPress) CMS. Generally, I give a DeepL translation 8/10 in terms of quality.
With our small Laravel Autotranslate package, we bring DeepL to our Laravel application workflow, enabling a command that automatically translates local language files (JSON) through DeepL.
The package only sends untranslated files over. Manually translated strings won’t be touched so you can mix and match automatic translation with human translation for the best total experience.
The package is freely available on GitHub.
