i18n-js VS react-i18next

I'm using expo-localization, which uses i18n-js to localise my app fully except for the app name.

The origin of this format start Ruby. The i18n-js format is a direct export of translations defined by Ruby on Rails. To export the translations, a Ruby gem can be used, that's completely disconnected from Rails and that can be used for the solely purpose of exporting the translations, even if your project is written in a different language. For JavaScript there's a companion JavaScript package. It comes bundled with all base translations made available by rails-i18n. Base translations allow formatting date, numbers, and sentence connectors, among other things.

In most packages (i18next, i18n-js), the approach used to access translations is as follows:

I was working on an app built with React on Rails. Most of the pages were written in React, but some pages were written in and rendered from the Rails views. This meant that I needed to figure out a way to provide translations on both the backend and the frontend. I searched for articles and tutorials, but I couldn’t find one that was solving the same problem I had. I found a lot of tutorials on “i18n-ing” Rails apps, and some on Rails and Javascript, but not on Rails and React. After spending some time researching, I decided to try rails-i18n and i18n-js gems.

> It’s important to be aware of what you are getting if you go with React, and what you are getting is a far cry from what a framework would offer, with all the corresponding pros and cons.

Would you like to elaborate on that?

In my experience, with something as great, size/ecosystem-wise as React, there will almost always be at least one "mainstream" package for whatever you might want to do with it, that integrates pretty well. Where a lot of things might come out of the box with a framework, with a library I often find myself just needing to install the "right" package, and from there it's pretty much the same.

For example, using https://angular.io/guide/i18n-overview or installing and using https://react.i18next.com/

Or something like https://angular.io/guide/form-validation out of the box, vs installing and using https://formik.org/

Or perhaps https://angular.io/guide/router vs https://reactrouter.com/en/main

Even adding something that's not there out of the box is pretty much the same, like https://primeng.org/ or https://primereact.org/

React will typically have more fragmentation and therefore also choice, but I don't see those two experiences as that different. Updates and version management/supply chain will inevitably be more of a mess with the library, admittedly.

Now, projects like Next https://nextjs.org/ exist and add what some might regard as the missing pieces and work well if you want something opinionated and with lots of features out of the box, but a lot of those features (like SSR) are actually pretty advanced and not always even necessary.

In a recent project I've been using react-i18next so I'll use its syntax for the examples, but pretty much every library works similarly.

react-i18next

i18next - You can find documentation and resources for using i18next at react.i18next.com. i18next is a popular internationalization framework for JavaScript, including React. It provides a comprehensive solution for handling translations, formatting, and more.

So far, we’ve been using a utility createLocalizedString to create and use the LocalizedString type. This utility is only really practical in unit tests. For real applications, we’ll want to use a translation function from react-i18next or next-i18next to do the heavy lifting. Then we just wrap the translation functions that are provided in order to use our type:

Website: https://react.i18next.com/

If you are talking about handling translations for your application, take a look at https://react.i18next.com/

I will be supporting Korean as a part of the beta. I have to look deeper into https://react.i18next.com/ in order to understand what it provides. My goal is for engineers to be able to click a single button and have localizations always up to date in their codebase, not delaying shipping a new version or having to even think about it.

With the new react-i18next version, when loading multiple namespaces, t function will infer and accept the keys for the first namespace. So this pattern is now accepted:

react-i18next