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"Say hello to Quetzal, your all-in-one solution for software internationalization"
tl;dr - We’re the fastest and easiest way to solve all of your translation and internationalization issues in one platform.
Founded by John Thompson & Brendan Agliardo
Hello, Hola, Guten Tag, 你好, etc., to you all! Meet John and Brendan, the team creating Quetzal.
John worked for three years at Slack on the Slack Connect team, handling new features and requests from customers around the world. He saw firsthand the pain that bad and challenging translations and internationalization had for everyone at the company, from engineers, to CSMs, to PMs, to users.
Brendan worked for two years at Mercatalyst, a retail startup founded by the creator of Woot.com, which sold to Amazon in 2010. He worked extensively on the project bringing in in-house Spanish translation, and experienced the headache that this effort caused.
Together, they decided to bring outdated and broken internationalization software and approaches into the year 2024 with Quetzal.
Why is the current approach to internationalization and translation broken? 🤕
If you're just starting out going international with your product, it can be daunting to see exactly what you need to do. Translating your whole product takes time and perhaps maybe weeks or months of engineering effort, depending on what solution you go with. How do you deliver consistent and accurate translations with context about how your application works? Software translation mostly relies on engineers haphazardly providing text to an internationalization service, which then needs to translate on a string-by-string basis. This strategy loses important context and leads to poor quality, and inconsistent translations, all while putting unnecessary work on engineers.
If your company already has a robust localization system, there's a whole host of other problems. You need to juggle the constant barrage of customer confusion, growth and change to your product and messaging, and external demands to adjust wording and phrasing, sometimes at the last second. Keeping up with all of that and making your language and messaging consistent with how your product works and what your intents are is super tough and puts unnecessary stress on your localization team.
Quetzal aims to tackle these problems with a new modern internationalization solution that understands your specific goals with each localization problem you're trying to solve.
Learn More
🌐 Visit getquetzal.com to learn more.
🤝 If you’re trying to internationalize or have already done it but are experiencing pain in the process (or if you know someone that is!) Please reach out to John or Brendan via email.
🔗 Connect the founders with people on Internationalization and Localization teams within your network so they can see what their pain is.
📤 Share this post! If you think what Quetzal is doing is cool, share this post out to your network!
🦜 Or if you just want to practice a second language (the founders speak English, Spanish, Mandarin, and German between them), play chess, or just chat about internationalization, reach out! (Yes, the team knows they used a parrot emoji in the title, please let them know when there is a real quetzal emoji).
👣 Follow Quetzal on LinkedIn.
