FAQ
Your most common questions about Locadapt, answered
General Questions
General Questions
What is Locadapt?
Locadapt is an AI-powered website translation service that accurately, simply, and affordably localizes websites into multiple languages, helping you reach a global audience.
How does Locadapt’s translation quality compare to other services?
Locadapt offers the best translation quality in the market. Our advanced AI-powered translation engine ensures highly accurate and natural-sounding translations across a wide range of languages. For more information, see our Translation Engine details.
Which languages does Locadapt support?
Locadapt supports approximately the top 100 most spoken languages worldwide. You can view the full list of supported languages on the configuration page for your projects. If you need support for additional languages, please reach out to us — we’re happy to expand our language offerings.
How fast are translations?
Our infrastructure is distributed in 300+ locations worldwide, meaning that users always get fast and reliable translations. Indeed, if you use a static site, loading spinner, or subdomains, there will be a “zero-second” delay — Locadapt will translate the content before it is rendered.
Otherwise, (for complex JavaScript frameworkes or when a new translation is dynamically requested after the page loads due to e.g. a popup), Locadapt performs the following steps:
- Content Extraction: Locadapt extracts the new content to be translated from the website.
- Translation: Locadapt translates the extracted content using our cache or advanced AI-powered translation engine.
- Content Insertion: Locadapt inserts the translated content back into the website.
There are three scenarios:
- Extracted content is cached: Locadapt will load all the possible existing translations for a language on a user’s first visit to a page. If the extracted content appears in this cache, Locadapt will skip the translation step and directly insert the cached translation into the website. This takes ~0.1 seconds.
- Extracted content is not cached, but has been translated by Locadapt before (for example, when changing languages): Locadapt will fetch the translation from our database, and add it to the cache. The whole process depends on a user’s connection quality, but generally will take ~1 second.
- Content is not cached and not translated before: Locadapt will translate the content with our advanced AI-powered translation engine. The round trip may take ~1-10 seconds or so depending on text length and complexity. Translated content gets added to the database and cache.
As a rule of thumb, the vast majority of translations will be instantaneous or take milliseconds. Switching between languages may take a second or so.
If, across all user sessions, a new translation is requested (no one ever requested that translation or specific page before), there may be a delay of around ~1-10 seconds as we perform our AI actions for all new content. However, all future individuals requesting that translation will have a much higher speed.
Technical Questions
Technical Questions
How does Locadapt count words for languages without spaces (e.g., Chinese, Japanese, Korean)?
For languages without clear word boundaries (CJK languages), we calculate the word count by dividing the total number of characters by 2. This provides a fair approximation of the content volume for these languages.
Can I customize the styling of the language selector?
Absolutely! Locadapt supports custom CSS styling. You can find more information on how to customize the appearance in our Custom Styling guide.
Can I host Locadapt on a subdomain or subdirectory?
Yes, Locadapt can be hosted on a subdomain or subdirectory of your website. For setup instructions, please refer to our URL Setup guide. Please note that subdomain hosting requires a paid plan, as it has associated ongoing costs with our reverse proxy service (Cloudflare for SaaS).
Can I programmatically control Locadapt’s behavior?
Yes, Locadapt provides a JavaScript API that allows you to programmatically update content, change languages, and more. This can be particularly useful for custom language-selection workflows or extremely dynamic content. For detailed information on available methods and properties, please refer to our API Reference.
SEO and Accessibility
SEO and Accessibility
Is Locadapt accessible for users with disabilities?
Yes, the Locadapt script is fully accessible and keyboard-friendly. We also translate all user-facing content in an accessible way, including:
- Alt text for images
- Metadata
- Titles
- Placeholders
- Any other content that would be accessed by assistive technologies
How does Locadapt handle internal links?
Locadapt rewrites internal links to ensure they point to the correct translated pages, maintaining a seamless user experience across languages.
How does Locadapt handle SEO for translated content?
Locadapt offers the best SEO results through our reverse proxy service for subdomains. This guarantees that search engines can properly index your translated content.
For other URL structures, translations are performed client-side, and so SEO may be nondeterministic (depends on whether Google’s search engine bots will choose to execute our JavaScript snippet).
For optimal SEO results:
- Use subdomains with our reverse proxy service (available on any paid plan)
- Ensure a real user visits the translated page before search engine bots crawl it (required)
Note that depending on your usecase, subdomains may not be required: as subdirectory and query parameter setups are more straightforward and lead to an equivalent user experience.
How do I set up subdomains for translation?
To set up subdomains (e.g., fr.example.com, paid plan required):
- Add a CNAME record pointing your wildcard subdomain to
proxy.locadapt.com - Update your Allowed Domains in the Locadapt dashboard to include the wildcard subdomain (e.g.,
*.example.com)
Note that you may have to wait a couple minutes for the DNS to propagate. For detailed instructions, please refer to our URL Setup guide.
Integration and Usage
Integration and Usage
Can I use Locadapt with frontend frameworks like Next.js?
Yes, Locadapt is compatible with hydrated frontend frameworks like Next.js. For full details on integration with various frontend frameworks, including Next.js, please refer to our Frontend Frameworks guide.
Is there a limit to how much content I can translate?
Locadapt offers various plans with different quotas for translated words and translation requests. You can find detailed information about our plans and their limits on our pricing page.
What happens if I exceed my plan’s quota?
If you approach your quota limit, we’ll send you alerts at 80% and 100% usage. If you consistently approach your limits, you may want to consider upgrading your plan. For more information, see our Quota Usage guide.
Help, translations are not initially showing!
If you are building with an SSR frontend framework, and have a very speedy loading spinner and odd DOM structure, it’s possible that Locadapt will not detect the initial content updates (after the spinner). In this case, you can manually call window.locadapt.updateContent(); to translate the content when you know it is ready.
For more details on integration with various frameworks, please see our Frontend Frameworks guide.
Why did the styling on my site get a bit shifted?
Rarely, you may notice odd padding or overflow issues if your CSS uses absolute positioning or fixed widths. This is because different languages have varying text lengths, which can affect layout. This issue is uncommon and would occur regardless of the translation provider used.
It’s generally a result of inflexible CSS or overly strict layouts. As such, we recommend updating your CSS to use more flexible approaches (like flexbox) instead of absolute positioning. This practice is beneficial not only for translations but also for better cross-browser compatibility and responsiveness.
Support and Resources
Support and Resources
Where can I get help if I have more questions?
If you have any other questions or need assistance, our support team is here to help. You can reach us at support@locadapt.com or through our contact page.
Are there any resources for developers?
Yes! Learn about local development in our Local Development guide, or see how you can interact with the Locadapt browser object at API Reference.
Do you offer any discounts?
We offer discounts to students and non-profit organizations. If you believe you qualify, please reach out to us at support@locadapt.com for more information.