Deduplication

Big projects accumulate duplicate strings: cta.save, button.save, and form.save_button all reading "Save changes". Every duplicate is a string you pay to translate again — and a chance for the copies to drift apart.

openlocale attacks this at import time, where duplicates usually enter.

How matching works

During import analysis, each new key's value is checked against the project's existing translations in that locale, in three passes:

1. Exact — SHA-256 value lookup. Instant at any project size.
2. Normalized — values are Unicode-normalized, lowercased, whitespace- collapsed, stripped of terminal punctuation, and their placeholder syntax canonicalized, then compared. This catches Save changes. vs save changes, and Hello vs Hello %s — different placeholder dialects, same string.
3. Fuzzy — character-trigram similarity (≥ 0.85) with length-band pruning, in pure portable code (identical behavior on SQLite and Postgres). Skipped automatically above 20k existing strings to keep imports fast; exact and normalized matching always run.

With an AI license, a fourth semantic pass sends sub-threshold near-misses to the language model, which judges whether the pair genuinely means the same thing — catching rewordings that no string metric can.

The review flow

Matches become suggestions on the import review screen, showing the incoming key/value next to the matched existing key/value with the match type and score. For each one you choose:

Action	Effect
Reuse existing key	The incoming key isn't created; its translations attach to the matched key. Use when the new key is simply redundant.
Link as alias	An alias record maps the incoming key name → the canonical key. Exports and CDN bundles resolve the alias, so client code using the old name keeps working while you maintain one string.
Create anyway	It's a genuine coincidence — proceed as a new key.

Decisions apply when you commit; unresolved suggestions default to create anyway.

In CI

openlocale push --dry-run prints the analysis, lists any duplicate suggestions, and exits with code 2 if there are any — so a pull request that introduces a duplicate string fails its pipeline and gets reviewed before the duplicate ships.