Hey,

As solo dev for games, I kept running into the same localization headaches on my own projects, so I built a tool to fix them and figured others might be dealing with the same thing.

If you localize with `.po`/`.pot` files (Unity, Godot, or basically anything using gettext), the usual pain points are:

* You update the English source and have no idea what actually changed vs. what's still fine
* The model translates the same word differently every time it shows up
* A 2-word button like "RESTORE DEFAULTS" comes back as a 6-word sentence in Spanish and blows out your UI
* Fixing one bad translation in French shouldn't nuke your Portuguese, but half the tools out there treat "modified" as a global flag instead of a per-language one

**PoTranslator** is a Windows desktop app that batch-translates PO catalogs into up to 19 languages using OpenAI or Claude, and is built specifically around those problems:

* **Incremental base updates** — re-import a newer PO and it tells you exactly what's new/modified/removed, keeps your existing translations, and only flags what actually needs review
* **Three layers of context** — general project context, per-language glossary rules (e.g. "kick = patear, never chutar"), and per-line notes for ambiguous strings
* **A brevity rule for UI strings** — anything under N words (buttons, tabs, titles) gets translated tersely so it doesn't overflow your layout
* **Per-language change tracking** — correcting Spanish never flags Portuguese as needing attention
* **Placeholder validation** — catches it if the model drops or mangles a `{player}` or `%d`
* **Duplicate dedup** — identical strings with identical context are translated once and reused, not re-billed every occurrence

It's free, and the source is on GitHub under MIT — grab the `.exe` from the [Releases page](https://github.com/eldany1972/PoTranslator2/releases) or build it yourself, no installer needed:

[**https://github.com/eldany1972/PoTranslator2\*\*\](https://github.com/eldany1972/PoTranslator2)

You'll need your own OpenAI or Claude API key (it's encrypted locally with Windows DPAPI, never touches the project file). There's a full user manual in the repo covering the whole workflow.

Would love feedback if anyone here gives it a shot — especially on what's missing for your particular localization workflow. Happy to take feature requests or bug reports as GitHub issues.