AI translation for PO files, 50x to 150x cheaper than human
PTC (Private Translation Cloud) translates your PO files 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. If your plugin, theme or app keeps its texts in PO files, PTC takes over the translation of every release. It is how we translate WPML.
- PTC learns your product once. It works out what the product 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 hiring a reviewer per language is the cost you are trying to avoid. PTC is built so that you do not need to.
- It knows your product. PTC learns what your product does and where each text 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. If you call a record a “Quote”, it is the same word on every screen and in every future 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, such as a German label that no longer fits its button.
What it costs: you pay per word, and only for what changed
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 is 17 WordPress plugins with 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 $285,000 |
| PTC, at the public Pay-As-You-Go price | about €1,700 |
After the first translation, a release costs only its new and changed texts.
We translate our own product this way
PTC is made by the team behind WPML, the WordPress multilingual plugin. Before PTC, each WPML release waited two weeks for expert translators. Now PTC translates and reviews WPML's PO files, and a release is ready in about three hours. Read how we translate WPML into 21 languages with PTC.
What your developers will ask, answered
PTC works on the files your product already has, so nothing in your build changes.
- Formats. PTC reads
.poand.potfiles from any gettext project: WordPress, Django, Drupal, Symfony and others. It returns.po,.mo,.l10n.phpor.json. - Nothing breaks. Placeholders such as
%sand%1$dstay intact, and each language gets the plural forms it needs: one for Japanese, three for Polish, six for Arabic. - The file stays yours. Comments, contexts, source references and the text domain come back as they were. Only the translations are filled in.
- WordPress. For preparing a plugin or theme and loading its translations, see translating WordPress themes and plugins and finding missing WordPress translations. To translate a WordPress site, not a plugin, use WPML.
- Other texts. Texts your users write go through the PTC API. Projects that mix PO with other files use one glossary for all of them; see the supported formats.
Choosing between community translation and PTC for a WordPress.org plugin? See GlotPress vs PTC.
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 plugin or theme in two languages before you pay anything.
Last updated: