Migrating an existing project

Style settings are the part of setup nobody wants to fill in by hand, so the import does it for you. Your translations are the best available description of how your product speaks, and they are already written.

If the project has no style guide, tone of voice or length preference yet, Localhero.ai samples the imported source strings and writes all three. New translations follow them from the first run, so what comes out reads like the copy already in your repository rather than like generic machine translation.

Glossary terms work differently. Candidate terms are extracted from your translations and proposed as suggestions, which you accept or dismiss. Nothing enters your glossary without you agreeing to it.

Both run in the background once the import finishes, so give them a moment. Everything they produce is editable: start from what the import found, then tune the specifics as you go. Head over to your project settings to see what was extracted.

Import is step 6 of init. It uploads the translation files already in your repository.

Source files are imported first, then target files. An existing non-blank target translation becomes a stored translation with a version whose source is recorded as an import, so the dashboard shows where the text came from.

Import also handles keys that exist only in a target file and not yet in the source file. These get matched up against the source key rather than duplicated.

To skip the upload entirely, pass --skip-import:

npx @localheroai/cli init --skip-import

Later uploads use push, and the two commands differ on one point: init filters imported target files to the target locales you configured, while push uploads any target file matching your configured path and pattern.

The rule is one check per key per language. A key is skipped when a translation already exists for that language and its content is non-blank. Everything else is sent for translation.

An empty string counts as missing and will be translated. If you keep placeholder entries with empty values in your target files, expect those to be filled in.

Keys that are already translated still appear in job results, marked completed, but they cost no credits. You are only charged for keys actually sent for translation, so bringing a large existing catalogue across is free.

The target-first matching described above does not apply to .po and .pot files. For gettext the locale swap does not change the file extension, so a target file cannot be matched back to its source by path alone.

For gettext projects, keys are matched from the source catalog. Your existing translations are still imported and still kept, and the non-blank rule above applies unchanged.