Built by engineers who shipped broken localization one too many times.
Tonguesage started as a frustration: a product team shipping to 12 markets, with translation always being the last thing that made the sprint. We built the thing we needed.
Why we built this
Mei Lin had spent four years at a fintech company shipping to Germany, Japan, and Brazil. The localization process was the same every release cycle: dev finishes a feature, someone exports the locale files to a shared folder, a translator gets a calendar invite, the translated files come back three days later if there are no questions, the dev merges them manually, and the sprint is four days behind.
The problem wasn't the translators. It wasn't the devs. It was that localization had no native place in the development workflow. It was a manual handoff between two systems that didn't talk.
Tonguesage exists to close that gap. Founded in New York in 2025, we're a small team of engineers who believe that every string your team ships should reach every language your users speak, on the same sprint.
Sync-first, not export-first
We treat localization as a property of the development loop, not a post-release task.
Translators deserve better tooling
The translator experience is a quality signal. Confusing exports mean guesswork. Diff views mean clarity.
No new tools, just better connections
Your team already has a workflow. We plug into it: your repo, your PM tool, your translator relationship.
The people building Tonguesage
Mei Lin Chen
CEO and Co-FounderPreviously engineering lead at a fintech company shipping to 12 markets. Spent years watching localization be the sprint item that always slipped. Started Tonguesage in 2025 to fix the workflow problem at the source.
Marcus Vidal
CTO and Co-FounderInfrastructure engineer background: distributed systems, webhook pipelines, string processing at scale. Designed the Tonguesage sync engine and translation memory architecture. Opinionated about file formats and strongly in favour of XLIFF.
Anika Brenner
Head of ProductShipped localized products in fintech and e-commerce before joining Tonguesage. Focuses on the translator experience and the integration points where developer workflows and translation workflows have to meet without friction.
We're building in public and talking to teams.
If you're shipping to multiple languages and localization is your last sprint item, we want to hear from you.