office_translator/docs/marketing/launch/show-hn.md

Hacker News — Show HN

Statut : prêt à publier (Phase 2, J0 matin EST). Soumettre via « Show HN » — pas de self-upvote.

Titre

Show HN: Office document translation that preserves the formatting

Corps

I built Office Translator (Wordly.art) because every document translator I used — Google, DeepL, the one-shot tools — destroyed the layout. Translating a 50-page Excel pricing matrix meant getting back a text dump: merged cells gone, formulas replaced by computed values, slide decks unrecognizable. The translation was 5% of the job; fixing the format was 95%.

So I made the format-preservation the product:

• In-place translation for .xlsx / .docx / .pptx / .pdf. The pipeline parses the native structure (cells + merges + formulas, paragraph runs + styles, slide XML + shapes), extracts only translatable content, translates it, and writes it back into the same structure. Output looks like it was authored in the target language.
• Scanned PDFs work too: image-only pages are recovered with OCR (Mistral) before translation — most competitors (DeepL, Azure) reject those outright.
• 6 engines, user's choice per document: Google (free), Google Cloud, OpenRouter LLMs in two tiers (DeepSeek / Gemini / Claude), OpenAI, and Grok (xAI). Cheap engine for drafts, premium LLM for client deliverables.
• Custom glossaries to lock technical/legal/medical terminology across documents.
• Vision translation for text inside images (paid plans).
• Privacy: uploads deleted after 30 min, results auto-deleted within 2 hours — no long-term retention — and content never used for training.
• API on the Business plan (10k calls/mo) — the web workflow is fully mirrored: submit file, poll job, download.

Stack: FastAPI (Python 3.11), openpyxl / python-docx / python-pptx, PyMuPDF, Postgres + Redis, Stripe, Docker, Next.js 15 frontend.

Free plan: 2 documents/month, no card. I'd love feedback from people who've worked on document-format-preserving pipelines — what edge cases do I not handle yet? (PDF incl. scanned/OCR is already in — next candidates are IDML and CSV.)

https://wordly.art

Notes de publication

• Soumettre à 8–9 h EST, mardi–jeudi
• Répondre à chaque commentaire dans les 2 h ; rester technique, pas commercial
• Pas de « upvote my post » — c'est interdit sur HN
• Préparer 2–3 réponses techniques de poches : formule Excel + localisation (format de nombre), fusion de cellules + traduction, gestion des runs mixtes (gras/italique au milieu d'un paragraphe)