About Quetzal

Quetzal was created by founders Brendan Agliardo and John Thompson, and inspired by bad experiences with internationalization at both of their respective jobs.

John worked at Slack as a Software Engineer, implementing and building globally-reaching products on the Slack Connect team. He was shocked at how little thought that was put in to internationalization, making engineers wrap strings in toggles and wait days for humans to translate individual strings. And after all the waiting, the resulting translations weren’t even good! They lacked context about the usage of the string, as well as consistency across whole product. Words that were the same were translated ten different ways.

Brendan worked at Mercatalyst as a Salesforce Engineer, working on internal tools to improve warehouse and shipping performance. He was involved with translating the product to Spanish, and worked on another approach to internationalization — hiring in-house translators. This approach is better in terms of creating translations with product context and consistency, however it was expensive and extremely time consuming.

After seeing both of these bad approaches, they decided to come together and build Quetzal — a new way to translate and internationalize that’s easy, affordable, context-aware, and consistent. Engineers don’t have to worry about whether they provided enough context to the human translators, don’t have to wrap their text in feature flags, and don’t have to delay launches due to missing translations. Companies don’t have to hire in-house human translators to get consistent, high-quality, and context-specific translations for their product.