Show HN: PoLibre – FOSS .po editor for machine assisted translation

A free and open source .po editor for machine assisted translation with built-in support for LibreTranslate and both offline/online LLMs (Claude, Gemini, Ollama).

Single binary desktop application with CLI support for scripts and workflow automations. Machine translation features are optional and the software can be used as a standalone .po editor.

• Automatic translation suggestions for every .po file and language in a project.
• Works with LibreTranslate , Claude, Gemini, OpenAI and OpenAI-compatible servers (Ollama, OpenRouter), or the Claude Code, Gemini and Codex command line tools.
• Gives LLMs context: the code around each string, a project description, a glossary and developer comments.
• Checks every translation (placeholders, HTML, URLs, plurals, length, ...) before writing it.
• Built-in editor to review: approve or fix translations, get suggestions, reuse existing translations, compare languages, keyboard shortcuts.
• Command line for scripts and CI, with GitHub Actions annotations and a JSON report.

Download from the releases page

cargo build --release                        # desktop app + command line
cargo build --release --no-default-features  # command line only

Run polibre to open the app: pick a project folder and a translation service, tick the languages and press Translate. Click Edit on a language to review its translations.

The same binary works from the command line:

polibre scan path/to/project                      # languages and missing strings
polibre translate . -l it,de -p libretranslate -k KEY --dry-run
polibre translate . -p anthropic -m claude-opus-5-5 --limit 20
polibre check . -l it --only-auto                 # re-check PoLibre's translations

Services (-p): libretranslate, anthropic, google, openai, openai-compatible (with --url), and claude-cli, gemini-cli, codex-cli (installed tools, no key needed). API keys can also come from ANTHROPIC_API_KEY, GEMINI_API_KEY, OPENAI_API_KEY or LIBRETRANSLATE_API_KEY. Settings are saved in ~/.config/polibre/config.json and shared with the app; --no-config ignores them. Run polibre --help for all options.

polibre translate . --no-config -p anthropic -m claude-opus-5-5 --report report.json

The bundled Inter font is © The Inter Project Authors, under the SIL Open Font License 1.1.

Originally inspired by dj-translatemessages