from Hacker News

Show HN: ʻŌlelo Honua – Simplify Your Internationalization Workflow

by rbrownmh on 3/25/25, 7:22 PM with 2 comments

I’m happy to introduce a new landing page for ʻŌlelo Honua, a tool created to simplify the internationalization (i18n) process for multilingual websites and applications. If managing translation files manually or dealing with cumbersome i18n workflows has ever been a challenge for you, this might be the solution you're looking for.

Since sharing an earlier alpha version of this project, a lot has changed! You can find a link to my original "Show HN" post in the comments.

What is ʻŌlelo Honua?

ʻŌlelo Honua, which means "World Language" or "Language Bridge" in Hawaiian, is designed to automate and streamline the creation and synchronization of translation files. By leveraging trusted providers like OpenRouter, Google Translate, along with new models like DeepSeek, it offers LLM-accelerated translations and even generates critiques to enable devs or translators to perform basic sanity checks. And best of all, my aim for this is to remain a free or low cost service.

Key Features:

- Automated Translation File Management: Quickly generate translations without the hassle of manual copy-pasting. - AI-Powered Critiques: Refine translations for clarity and accuracy with optional AI-driven feedback. - Provider Flexibility: Integrates with multiple translation providers, including free options via OpenRouter (DeepSeek). - Caching: Avoid API limits with built-in local caching.

Why I Built This:

As a developer, I found managing translation files for multilingual apps tedious and prone to errors. Existing tools didn’t fully address these challenges, so I created ʻŌlelo Honua to streamline the process and make it more reliable. My goal was to provide a free solution that enables developers to implement i18n quickly, as I’ve personally seen it overlooked due to concerns about maintainability and effort.

Additional Thoughts:

This project is still a work in progress, but I’m passionate about its continued development and things are moving quickly! I’d love to hear your feedback, and I’m actively looking for contributors (developers) and collaborators (editors, translators) to join me on this journey. Please reach out if interested!

  • by blackbrokkoli on 4/4/25, 2:47 PM

    Hey, cool that you're working on this problem :)

    Some feedback: I'd love some simple usage examples. I'm a newbie to the space of i18n, and your documentation goes from the installation (simple enough) to a fairly fat boilerplate to put in my app.js, without communicating how the actual workflow will actually look like.

    Maybe I'm not your target audience, tho...

  • by rbrownmh on 3/25/25, 7:25 PM