Today marks an important milestone in my journey to build 20 online projects in 2025. I decided to start with my old blog, “New Business Ideas”. The blog, which had around 1,200 articles on business-related topics, was originally written in Russian. Both the interface and the content needed to be translated into English. Why English? The answer is simple: it’s the global language, which means a larger audience and, consequently, greater earning potential.
Translating the Interface
The first challenge was updating the site’s interface, built on Laravel. Although I wasn’t very familiar with Laravel, I managed to find suitable templates and successfully translated the interface into English. Next, I tackled the categories—a time-consuming but necessary step to maintain the site’s structure.
Automating Article Translation
The real challenge, however, was translating 1,200 articles. Doing it manually would have been an enormous task, so I decided to automate the process. I developed a web application using Next.js to streamline the translation workflow. The app included several key features:
- Start: This button initiated the process by opening the site’s admin panel, logging in, navigating to the specified page, extracting content (about 10 fields), and sending it to the ChatGPT API for translation. The API processed the content, preserving the HTML structure, and returned the translated version, which was then inserted into the appropriate fields.
- Regenerate: If a translation failed or needed improvement, this button allowed me to retry the process without manually re-entering the admin panel.
- Skip: For spammy or irrelevant posts, I could skip translation altogether and mark them for deletion later.
- Save/Next: After reviewing the translated content, I could save it and move to the next article, restarting the process.
Results and Insights
With this level of automation, I was able to translate around 200-300 articles per day, even while working only half-days during the Christmas holidays. In just one week, the entire blog was translated into English.
This experience taught me a valuable lesson: automation is the key to scaling projects efficiently. By investing time in creating tools and systems, I can focus on growth rather than being bogged down by repetitive tasks. This realization will shape how I approach my next projects in this experiment.