tl;dr - We’re the fastest and easiest way to solve all of your translation and internationalization issues in one platform.

Hello, Hola, Guten Tag, 你好, etc., to you all! We’re John and Brendan, the team creating Quetzal.

John (on the left) 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 (on the right) 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Together, they decided to bring outdated and broken internationalization software and approaches into the year 2024 with Quetzal.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, 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 tackles these problems with a new modern internationalization solution that understands your specific goals with each localization problem you're trying to solve.

Our ask to you, kind reader:

• 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 us at john@getquetzal.com or brendan@getquetzal.com.
• Connect us with people on Internationalization and Localization teams within your network so we can see what their pain is.
• Share this post! If you think what we’re doing is cool, share this post out to your network!
• Or if you just want to practice a second language (we speak English, Spanish, Mandarin, and German between us), play chess, or just chat about internationalization, let us know!

(Yes, we know that we used a parrot emoji in the title, please let us know when they add a real quetzal).

Thank you very much for reading,

John Thompson & Brendan Agliardo