i18n (Part 1) — Smashing Magazine

Internationalization, or i18n, is making your content understandable in other languages, regions, and cultures to reach a wider array of people. However, a more interesting question would be, “Why is i18n important?”. The answer is that we live in an era where hundreds of cultures interact with each other every day, i.e., we live in a globalized world. However, our current internet doesn’t satisfy its globalized needs.

Did you know that 60.4% of the internet is in English, but only 16.2% percent of the world speaks English?

Source: Visual Capitalist

Yes, it’s an enormous gap, and until perfect AI translators are created, the internet community must close it.

As developers, we must adapt our sites’ to support translations and formats for other countries, languages, and dialects, i.e., localize our pages. There are two main problems when implementing i18n on our sites.

1. Storing and retrieving content.
   We will need files to store all our translations while not bloating our page’s bundle size and a way to retrieve and display the correct translation on each page.
2. Routing content.
   Users must be redirected to a localized route with their desired language,...