Rocket.Chat’s formula for scalable, community-driven localization in 64 languages

At a glance: How Rocket.Chat supports global growth with continuous localization

Rocket.Chat has built a localization workflow that matches the scale of its international platform. With LingoHub embedded into development, the team coordinates multilingual updates across multiple languages, reduces repetitive developer tasks, and empowers hundreds of contributors to translate alongside product changes.

3 employees, 300+ contributors

A lean internal team manages localization with the support of a global community.

64 languages, worldwide coverage

LingoHub connects GitHub and continuous translation work into a single, automated workflow.

Thousands of strings, zero syntax errors

A centralized translation memory keeps language consistent across web, mobile, and desktop.

Rocket.Chat - Where secure communication meets open-source flexibility

Rocket.Chat is a fully customizable, open-source communications platform that brings team collaboration, omnichannel customer support, and secure messaging into one centralized hub. What sets the company apart is its strong commitment to privacy, flexibility, and data ownership. Organizations can deploy the open-source platform on-premises, in air-gapped environments, or in the cloud, depending on their security and infrastructure needs. 

Its global community is central to Rocket.Chat’s mission is to make localization essential for product adoption. As a secure communications platform used by organizations around the world, the product needs to feel accessible and intuitive in every market it serves. That means making the user interface, admin experience, and apps available in users’ native languages without interrupting software development.

The challenge: Supporting multilingual product adoption without slowing down development

As the company grew, its localization workflow became harder to manage efficiently. Internally, developers were pulled into repetitive localization tasks, including reviewing translation PRs, fixing syntax issues, and resolving merge conflicts. Externally, non-technical contributors faced a high barrier to entry, even though many were eager to help translate the product.

Rocket.Chat needed a better way to support global growth, one that would open localization to its worldwide community, reduce manual effort for engineering, and keep multilingual releases moving efficiently.

The solution: Localization that moves with product releases

LingoHub was integrated directly into Rocket.Chat’s GitHub workflow, which made localization part of the team’s existing development process while enabling participation from non-technical community contributors. Now, new strings are pushed as part of normal development, automatically detected in LingoHub, translated in an intuitive interface, and returned to the repository through clean pull requests.

This gives Rocket.Chat a scalable localization model that significantly reduces engineering effort, makes it easier for its global community to contribute across products, and enables translators to work in parallel. 

As a result, Rocket.Chat eliminates broken builds caused by translation file errors, saves dozens of developer hours per month, and scales localization to 64 languages without increasing headcount. Translation turnaround also improved, with top-tier languages often ready before new features reached the main release.