I've spent the past five years deep in the guts of localization tooling for huge tech companies. The kind of orgs that have 50+ engineers working on localization frameworks and pipelines for shipping strings and translations back and forth. Not to mention a sizable team of human translators with a management system and review workflow. The infrastructure is complicated, but these companies can do it.

The problem is that this only makes sense for a small number of companies. If you're a two-sided marketplace with hundreds of new listings a day, or a social app trying to seed a content flywheel in a new market, it just hasn't been feasible to have all of that translated in a timely fashion. The content moves too fast and the economics don't work.

I think we're at an inflection point with AI-powered translations. LLM quality is now good enough, with the correct architecture and guardrails, to confidently handle content that was previously not realistic to localize at scale.

Fora is not a replacement for human translation. If your content needs to be word-perfect — legal copy, brand campaigns, regulated information — then a human touch is still the right call. But if your product generates more content than any translation team could keep up with, that's exactly where we fit.

Our goal is to bring your content to the world with the flick of a switch (or an entry in a config file).