Rails localization with AI, 50x to 150x cheaper than human
PTC (Private Translation Cloud) translates your Rails app ready to publish, for 50 to 150 times less than human translation and review costs.
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 Rails app, release after release. Our own Rails application is translated this way too. 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 “Host” is translated as the person who offers a listing, not as a server.
- 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 label that overflows its button in German 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 the YAML files in
config/localesand returns one file per language, such asposts.es.yml, with the same keys and structure. - Nothing breaks. Interpolations such as
%{name}stay intact, and each language gets the plural keys it needs:one,few,manyandotherfor Polish, onlyotherfor Japanese. - Texts still in the views. A text hard-coded in a view never reaches the locale files. Your coding agent moves such texts into them during setup. See how to prepare software for translation.
- Texts in the database. Listings, posts and other texts your users write go through the PTC API. Your app sends the text, and PTC calls it back when the translations are ready, with the same glossary as your locale files.
- What it took by hand. Before PTC's agent existed, we localized our own Rails app by hand: 2,988 texts, 7 days and 8 rounds before the result was stable. That work is now PTC's.
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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