Introducing Polyglot Automation

We built Polyglot around a deliberately narrow idea: i18n should feel like developer tooling. Scan, wrap, translate, and preview — in your repo, from your terminal, before you commit.

That workflow has a boundary, though. The moment a second person needs to sign off on a translation, or a team wants "no new untranslated strings" to actually mean something, you're past what a local CLI should do. Those are coordination problems, and they live where your team already coordinates: pull requests.

Today we're opening early access to Polyglot Automation for Team and Scale plans.

What it does

Checks on every PR. A native GitHub Check compares each pull request against its base and reports what's new, what's existing debt, and what got resolved. Your backlog stays visible, and existing debt doesn't fail a no-new policy. Checks start informational. Policies that block a merge are in early access, and a Check only blocks once Polyglot verifies it's required in your branch rules.

Review in one place. Generated translations wait for a human yes. Reviewers see the source string, the context, and the exact diff — nothing ships without an approval.

Translation PRs, opened for you. Once translations are approved, Polyglot verifies the catalog-only change against a pristine base — your configured verification command has to pass on both — then the Publisher App opens a separate pull request. During early access, those PRs default to drafts. Your team merges them, your branch protections and review rules still apply, and Polyglot resyncs from your default branch afterward.

Built like something you'd let into your repo

We assumed you'd read the permissions screen carefully, because we would:

• Two separate GitHub Apps. The Checks App can't write repository contents. The Publisher App — a separate, optional install — can only push verified catalog branches and open pull requests.
• No long-lived secret in your repo. The managed workflow authenticates with GitHub OIDC; credentials are scoped to a single run and expire in minutes.
• Never a direct write to your default branch. Everything lands as a PR.
• Your repo keeps ownership — source files, catalogs, polyglot.toml, and the workflow itself, pinned to a commit SHA.

The free path stays open

The CLI and the open GitHub Action are available on every plan, including free — the Action even runs without an API key. Commit a polyglot.toml, add a few lines to a workflow file, and every PR gets checked:

- uses: actions/checkout@v4
  with:
    fetch-depth: 0
- uses: polyglot-i18n/[email protected]
  with:
    check-mode: differential

The open Action reports new, existing, and resolved findings. It doesn't generate translations or open translation PRs itself — that's the managed part.

Polyglot Automation is for the point where shared review and sign-off become the bottleneck, not before.

Polyglot Automation is in early access for Team and Scale — you can join from your dashboard. We'd love to hear how it fits your workflow: try it, and tell us what your team needs next.