Android localization with AI, 50x to 150x cheaper than human
PTC (Private Translation Cloud) translates your Android app ready to publish, for 50 to 150 times less than human translation and review costs.
Using Claude Code, Codex or Cursor?
Connect PTC to your agent and it does this for you: it learns your app, asks you only what the code can't answer, and translates and reviews every language. One prompt:
Localize this app into German and Spanish with PTC.
Set up once, then every release is translated on autopilot
PTC is built for a product that keeps changing, not for a one-time translation job. PTC takes over the translation of your Android app, release after release. It is how we translate our own product, WPML.
- PTC learns your product once. It works out what your app does, who uses it and which terms it uses, and keeps that knowledge for every later release.
- Your team sets up what to translate once. A developer connects PTC to the repository, or lets a coding agent such as Claude Code or Codex do the setup from one prompt. See how the PTC agent guide works. You decide three things: which languages, whether the price is right, and how translations should arrive.
- From then on it runs by itself. When your team changes a text, PTC translates it and sends the files for every language as a pull request to GitHub, GitLab or Bitbucket. Nobody sends files, chases translators or pastes texts back.
- You pay only for what is new and changed. A text that was translated once is never charged again.
Translations you can publish without reading them
You cannot check a Japanese or a Polish translation yourself, and a reviewer per language is the cost you are trying to avoid. PTC is built so that you do not need one.
- It knows your product. PTC translates each text for the place where it appears. A word such as “Run” is translated as the button it is, not as the sport.
- It reviews its own work. Every translation is reviewed against your product's description and its glossary before delivery, and PTC fixes what the review finds.
- Your terms stay the same everywhere. PTC builds a glossary from your existing translations and texts, and uses it on every screen and in every later release. See brand voice and glossary.
- It can look at the screens. Where AI Visual QA is enabled for your account, PTC checks the translated product on screen and flags what looks wrong. A German label that no longer fits its button is the usual example.
What it costs: 50 to 150 times less than human translation
There is no subscription, no price per user and no minimum. The price per 1,000 words starts at €3.00 and falls with monthly volume to €0.40. The first 500 words each month are free. The pricing page has the full table.
Our own product shows the scale. WPML has about 80,000 words, in 21 languages:
| Translating all of WPML into 21 languages | Cost |
|---|---|
| Human translation and review, at about $0.17 a word | about $285,000 |
| PTC, at the public Pay-As-You-Go price | about €1,700 |
That is about 150 times less at WPML's volume, and about 50 times less at the starting price. After the first translation, a release costs only its new and changed texts.
We translate our own product this way
PTC is made by the team behind WPML, the WordPress multilingual plugin. Before PTC, each WPML release waited two weeks for expert translators. Now PTC translates and reviews it, and a release is ready in about three hours. Read how we translate WPML into 21 languages with PTC.
What your developers will ask, answered
PTC works on the files your product already has, so nothing in your build changes.
- Formats. PTC reads
res/values/strings.xmland returns onevalues-{locale}/strings.xmlper language, under the names Android expects. - Nothing breaks. Every
name=key stays as it is. Positional placeholders such as%1$sstay intact,<string-array>lists keep their structure, and<plurals>get the forms each language needs: one for Japanese, four for Polish, six for Arabic. - iOS in the same project. Put the iOS String Catalog next to
strings.xml, and a term decided for Spanish on Android is the same term on iOS. See iOS localization. - Play Store listing and release notes. They live outside
strings.xml. Paste them into the same project and they use the same glossary. - Texts your users write. Chat, posts and reviews go through the PTC API as they arrive.
- Preparing the app. For texts still hard-coded in Kotlin or layouts, see how to prepare software for translation.
Try it on your own product, free
The trial covers 20,000 words into 2 languages for 30 days, with no credit card. That is enough to see a whole app in two languages before you pay anything.
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