Tips, tutorials, and insights on i18n and localization for developers.
Translating locale files is the easy part to automate. What breaks is what translation does to placeholders and plurals. One workflow file catches it on every pull request, with no API key and no account.
Scanning real repositories to find broken translations mostly found bugs in the checker doing the scanning. The taxonomy of those mistakes, the fixtures they became, and the one I got wrong in the other direction.
UIStringBench v1: seven LLM judges from three providers, scored on detecting UI-string translation errors. Detection is saturated — the interesting results are the unanimous dissents from my own labels, and the product bug the benchmark caught.
Key-diffing catches the missing key. It doesn't catch the Spanish that says the opposite of the English. A QA gate that reads your translations — with the numbers, and the false positives.
Placeholder mismatches between translations cause runtime crashes that pass linting and tests. Here's why they're hard to catch and how to detect them.
I built a news aggregator that automatically translates article summaries to 5 languages the moment they're published. Here's how with RSS feeds, Claude AI, and a translation API.
We built a translation API, then realized we needed to translate our own website. Here's how we dogfooded Shipi18n to ship 11 languages in one afternoon.
Complete guide to internationalization in Next.js 14/15 App Router. Set up multi-language support with i18next and automated translations.
Tired of manually copying strings into Google Translate? Automate React i18n with an open-source CLI that uses your own LLM key — no account, no hosted API.