polyglots

Review a locale's submissions in minutes, not evenings.

polyglots checks and translates WordPress .po files for translate.wordpress.org locale teams. It runs deterministic checks on every string, asks an AI agent to judge what a rule cannot, writes the repairs into a file you open in your .po editor, and drafts translations from your translation memory, your glossary and a machine translation engine.

Documentation: https://ada.tools/polyglots/docs/

What it does

• Review a submission. Every string is checked for placeholders, HTML, plural forms, whitespace, escaping, punctuation, glossary terms, your locale's rules and consistency with approved translations. An AI agent judges the findings a rule cannot settle. The entries that need work are written to a -problems.po file, already repaired where the fix is mechanical, with a short message you can post back to the contributor, or a whole reply filled in from your locale's template. Mark a folder of submissions and review them in one run, with a reply ready for each contributor.
• Translate. Pending entries are filled from translation memory first, then drafted by DeepL, OpenAI or a local model, and reviewed by the agent before they are written.
• Fetch from translate.wordpress.org. Download waiting or untranslated strings for themes and plugins and review or translate each project.
• See your work. A statistics page served on your own machine: submissions reviewed, what was flagged, projects, and a share image.
• Interactive mode. Run polyglots with no arguments for a full-screen menu with a setup wizard, help on every screen and live progress. Everything it does is also a command, for scripts and automation.

Nothing is uploaded to translate.wordpress.org. You import the results yourself.

Requirements

• Node.js 24 or newer.
• For AI review, one of:
  • Claude Code, signed in;
  • Antigravity's agy CLI, signed in;
  • a local model server (Ollama, LM Studio, llama.cpp or vLLM).
• For machine translation drafts, optionally a DeepL or OpenAI API key, or the same local model server.

None of these is required: choose No AI in setup and every mechanical check still runs, with nothing sent to a model.

polyglots doctor reports which agents are installed and signed in, without sending a prompt. polyglots models lists local model servers and the models they hold.

Install

npm install -g polyglots

From a checkout instead:

git clone https://github.com/emreerkan/polyglots.git
cd polyglots/app
npm ci
npm run build
npm link

First run

polyglots

The setup wizard asks for your locale, your review agent (or No AI), a draft engine and its key, then downloads your locale's glossary from translate.wordpress.org. Its last question is whether to share anonymous usage totals; the answer is no unless you say yes. Every step can be skipped and run again later from Configuration.

The same from the command line:

polyglots config set defaultLocale de
polyglots glossary sync
polyglots review plugin-de.po
polyglots translate theme-de.po

Both take several files at once; review a.po b.po --parallel 2 reviews them as one batch.

There is no default locale. review and translate also accept --locale, or read the file's Language header when nothing else names one.

Where your data lives

• ~/.config/polyglots/: settings (config.json), API keys (.env, readable by you only), your locale rules and your reply templates.
• ~/.local/share/polyglots/polyglots.db: translation memory and glossary. It is built from your imports and cannot be rebuilt from anything else, so back it up.
• ~/.local/share/polyglots/jobs.db: run history and caches. Deleting it costs a re-review, nothing more.

Set POLYGLOTS_HOME to keep everything under one other directory.

Network calls

polyglots talks to translate.wordpress.org (glossaries, project downloads and approved translations for consistency checks) and to the services you choose: your review agent, and DeepL, OpenAI or your local model server for drafts. If you opt in to usage statistics, a weekly count of strings reviewed goes to ada.tools/polyglots; it is off unless you turn it on. Once a day, polyglots asks registry.npmjs.org for its latest version number, to say when an update is out; turn that off with polyglots config set updateCheck off or NO_UPDATE_NOTIFIER=1. Nothing else.

Contributing

See CONTRIBUTING.md.

Contributors

Thank you to everyone who has improved polyglots:

• Kamran Abdul Aziz:
  • sentence marks beyond .!? in the punctuation check, so Hindi, Japanese, Arabic and other scripts' correct endings are no longer reported (#20, #21);
  • text that differs only in Unicode encoding, such as Hindi ड़ or Bengali য়, compared as the same text in the glossary, memory and consistency checks (#23, #24).

License

MIT. See LICENSE.