How one developer translated a TV tracker app into 46 languages for free
A solo developer behind dizi.jpg, a TV show and movie tracking app, needed to translate a large catalogue of descriptions into 46 languages but ruled out commercial translation APIs due to prohibitive per-character costs. Instead, they built an offline batch translation pipeline using open-source tools Argos Translate and CTranslate2, running translations on their own computer and storing results in a PostgreSQL database. This approach eliminates per-request translation costs and latency, while also allowing search engines to index fully translated pages for each language. The trade-offs include lower output quality compared to commercial systems, potential errors when no direct language-pair model exists, and a lag before new content appears in translated languages. The developer recommends this method to other solo or small-team content-heavy projects seeking multilingual support without ongoing API bills.
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