Plug in, translate faster: Meet Smartling’s MCP server

AI translation is becoming a go-to for global companies. It speeds up turnaround, cuts costs, and frees up localization teams for higher-value work. But if you’ve ever used a generic LLM without context, you’ve seen the pitfalls: inconsistent quality, rework for translators, and delays that frustrate both marketing and engineering. The right approach is one that works for everyone. Marketers and localization teams get brand-perfect translations, and developers get clean, efficient integrations.

Connecting your translation platform with AI tools boosts accuracy and fluency—but traditional API integrations can be slow to build, hard to maintain, and clunky to use. Smartling’s Model Context Protocol (MCP) server solves that by acting as a universal connector. It lets marketing, localization, and engineering teams tap directly into Smartling’s capabilities from any MCP-compatible AI tool—no extra SDKs, brittle custom scripts, or constant context-switching.

The open standard powering smarter AI translation

MCP is an open standard from Anthropic that defines how AI apps communicate with other systems. If you’re not a developer, you can think of it as a “universal connector” that lets AI assistants securely access resources like databases, APIs, and external platforms. If you’re a developer, it’s a clean, open spec you can plug into your toolchain without much overhead. Smartling’s MCP server links your AI tools directly to our translation platform so you can run translations, check job status, and pull assets—all from your AI chat or dev environment.

Seamless AI translation within your existing tools

Smartling’s MCP server connects with any MCP-compatible platform. Use it to integrate with AI assistants like Claude, Visual Studio Code, Cursor, and other AI tools to access our translation capabilities directly within your developer environment or AI chat tool interface. When paired with your AI tools, Smartling enhances translation accuracy and tone, while enabling you to request past translations, access account insights, and directly initiate translation actions from Smartling. 

Here are the top three benefits we’re seeing for companies using Smartling’s MCP server:

Higher-quality translations

With Smartling’s MCP server, your AI tools aren’t working blind—your LLM can pull brand style guides, glossaries, and translation memories in real time. That means localization and marketing can get on-brand, terminology-perfect translations, and developers can get output that’s production-ready without extra QA cycles. Consistency across every locale becomes the default, not a nice-to-have.

Easier workflows

Even if you already use advanced AI platforms, bouncing between tabs, tools, and applications wastes time. With the MCP server, you can pull existing translations, check job statuses, or kick off new work without leaving VS Code, Cursor, Claude, or your other AI workspaces. For marketers and localization teams, that means fewer bottlenecks. For engineers, it means less boilerplate code and fewer API calls to maintain.

Full-team access

No more siloed access or one-off credentials. With Smartling’s MCP server, localization managers, engineers, and product teams can all use the same translation tools in the environments they already work in—whether that’s an MCP-enabled AI chat tool or an AI coding assistant. Everyone stays in sync, and onboarding new teammates is as simple as sharing a prompt.

Stop context switching. Start translating smarter.

Smartling’s MCP server connects your AI tools and translation platform in a way that works for marketers, localization teams, product managers, and developers: high-quality, on-brand translations for every market, delivered right in the tools your teams already use. 

If you want to see exactly how it would work in your environment, book a meeting and we’ll give you a customized walkthrough.