This month I built something I’m really excited about: backpack/auto-translate. Its bold promise: make running a multi-language app fee...
This month I built something I’m really excited about: backpack/auto-translate
. Its bold promise: make running a multi-language app feel as simple as running a single-language one.
If you’ve ever built for clients who wanted multiple languages, you know the drill. They promise to keep everything translated - but they rarely frekin do. Six months later, the French page is half-English-half-French, and users wonder if they clicked the wrong flag. It hurts the brand and frustrates the people who actually need those translations. 😡
Why does this happen? It's simple: admins have better things to do than translate. Luckily, modern APIs (DeepL, Google, AWS) and general-purpose AIs are now good enough to take over. No, really!
We started with the idea of a small helper — just a command to fill in missing translations. But then we realized we could go bigger. What if the whole thing happened automatically? A package so smooth that admins never worry about translations again. Some of us doubted it was possible. But it works. And it feels absolutely magical! Here's the simplest example we can show you:
What happened here? The admin added an entry in their language, and it automatically got translated to all other languages the app supports 🤯 You might think this is a gimmick, but no - it really works, for content small and large. We made sure of it!
Here’s the gist:
spatie/laravel-translatable
How do you use it? However you like:
created
or updated
That’s it. Translations just… happen. Behind the scenes. No nagging, no guilt, no half-English pages.
You're skeptical, I can feel it. We were too. But it’s already running on six client projects, including this site. None of us speak Bulgarian, yet the site does. Are the translations perfect? No. Are they better than nothing? Absolutely — and a huge relief for admins. They can always polish them if they want - which is much easier than translating from scratch.
We’ve released it as v0.4.3, which feels stable enough for production. We’d love your feedback before tagging v1.0.
👉 Install it today — and let us know how it works for you. Heads-up, you'll only have access to this if you purchased our EVERYTHING bundle. We might change our minds later, but for now, we want to give our EVERYTHING supporters an edge. To make their lives considerably easier.
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