react-i18next VS locize-cli

> 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

Now let's install the locize-cli:

Just use this cli to synchronize the translations with your code. To see how this could look like check out Step 1 in this tutorial.

install the locize-cli (npm i locize-cli)

You can, for example, run an npm script script (or similar), which will use the cli to download the translations from locize into the appropriate folder next-i18next is looking in to (i.e. ./public/locales). This way the translations are bundled in your app and you will not generate any CDN downloads during runtime.

First you need to signup at locize and login. Then create a new project in locize and add your translations. You can add your translations either by importing the individual json files or via API or by using the CLI.

First in locize, create a dedicated version for production. Do not enable auto publish for that version but publish manually or via API or via CLI. Lastly, enable Cache-Control max-age​ for that production version.