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Automated translations via wagtail-localize #446

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Automated translations via wagtail-localize#446
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Raghaddahi

Description

@thibaudcolas
thibaudcolas
opened on Jun 18, 2026

Problem statement

We want to have an easier time managing large amounts of content for the guide site, across multiple languages. Thoughtful use of automation would help with that.

Proposed solution

Try out the machine translations options of wagtail-localize:

  • Prototype / POC with DeepL
  • Trial wagtail-localize-ai
    • Review quality and cost per page / per string
  • Try to create an eval suite for machine translation
    • Review quality and cost per page / per string
  • Pick best option
    • Confirm cost of doing this at scale: 1000 pages, across 10 languages
  • Proceed with production implementation
    • Seed command
    • Production setup: TensorX or Scaleway with GLM 5.2 or Gemma 4

Alternative solutions

No response

Additional context

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Working on this

Assigning to @Raghaddahi

Activity

  1. thibaudcolas
    assigned
    Raghaddahi
    on Jun 18, 2026
  2. thibaudcolas
    added this to GSoC 2026: Guide website revampon Jun 18, 2026

  3. Raghaddahi commented on Jul 16, 2026

    @Raghaddahi
    Raghaddahi
    on Jul 16, 2026
    Member
    Image

    child pages is translated without translations

  4. Raghaddahi commented on Jul 17, 2026

    @Raghaddahi
    Raghaddahi
    on Jul 17, 2026
    Member

    Cost calculation: 1000 pages × 10 languages
    Page translations: 10,000 (1,000 × 10)
    Avg chars/page: 4,708
    Total chars: 47,080,000 (~47.1 M chars)
    DeepL cost
    DeepL's Growth plan (€29.75/month base, 1M chars included, €22 per extra million)

    • the one-time bulk run costs roughly €850–1,050

  5. thibaudcolas commented on Jul 24, 2026

    @thibaudcolas
    thibaudcolas
    on Jul 24, 2026
    MemberAuthor

    Prompt engineering tips relevant for the LLM prototype - things to learn about:

    • Context w/ guidelines
      • Role
      • Formatting
      • Nature of the task
    • Zero-shot vs. one-shot vs. multi-shot
    • Evals + LLM as a judge
    • Guardrails

    Tools to try:

    Models:

    • z-ai/glm-5.2
    • deepseek/deepseek-v4-flash
    • google/gemma-4-26b-a4b-it

    Benchmarks:

    • TBC - ideally something that scores lots of models
    • Ideally something where we can get a pareto frontier line

  6. Raghaddahi commented on Aug 3, 2026

    @Raghaddahi
    Raghaddahi
    on Aug 3, 2026
    Member

    Cost Review "Manage documents" page (11 segments), English → Arabic

    Model Input tokens Output tokens Total tokens Page cost Avg cost/string
    google/gemma-4-26b-a4b-it 4,261 607 4,868 $0.000505 $0.000046
    deepseek/deepseek-v4-flash 4,799 12,905 17,704 $0.004285 $0.000390
    z-ai/glm-5.2 3,904 11,178 15,082 $0.054649 $0.004968

    Projected Total Cost (1,000 pages × 10 languages)

    Extrapolated from this page's per-page cost:

    Model Projected total cost
    gemma-4-26b-a4b-it ~$5.05
    deepseek-v4-flash ~$42.85
    z-ai/glm-5.2 ~$546.49

  7. thibaudcolas commented on Aug 12, 2026

    @thibaudcolas
    thibaudcolas
    on Aug 12, 2026
    MemberAuthor

    Next steps:

    Example:

    msgid "Publish"
msgstr "نشر"

    ar/LC_MESSAGES/django.po

    Need some creation way to retrieve labels and translations of UI elements from Wagtail core. From the correct Wagtail version, without being out of sync

  8. thibaudcolas commented on Aug 14, 2026

    @thibaudcolas
    thibaudcolas
    on Aug 14, 2026
    MemberAuthor

    Remaining question: what is the workload for people to review and update translations after the first draft with AI

    Raghad: 2 days for whole site

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