So you develop an app in React and you want many users to use it, right? To make your app usable for users in foreign countries, you have to translate your App to their languages. 🇬🇧 🇨🇳 🇮🇹 🇪🇸 🇫🇷

In this article, I am going to show you, how to integrate i18next and Tolgee into your project and how easy and fast you can translate a React app using these tools.

Tolgee has also its native integrations. Which are a bit easier to set up, so if you're not used to i18next, maybe it would be easier for you to start with those.

The i18next library is one of the most popular choices for formatting translations in React applications. We decided, that we want to improve the experience by offering an easy integration with Tolgee. Localization is now uniquely accessible as your translations can be managed through opensource platform, without wasting precious Dev time.

When I started to develop Tolgee for my master thesis about 2 years ago, one of my goals was to provide a localization tool also for developers who would like to use it locally on their machine.

Things were different those days. Tolgee was named Polygloat and the tool was intended to be simplest as possible. So I wanted to keep the tool small, and I didn't want to make users to run separate database server for it. But I also wanted to run the app in cloud, where Postgres is considered "more production ready" choice.

Some time ago I've came across an article about inserting secret text into regular messages using invisible zero-width unicode characters. Now during my work on localization SDKs, I've found quite interesting use case for it.

We always recommend preparing projects for localization as soon as possible. A lot of people, we are talking with, say that they are in early stage of development of their app and localization 🌎 is something they don't need right now.

Setting localization aside is not a good idea, and I am going to tell you why.

In Tolgee.io we needed to implement integrations for all major frontend frameworks. I'd say, that this is quite a good opportunity to show a real world comparison between them and it will allow us to dive into a bit more advanced functionality.

In Tolgee localization platform, we manage translations. So our most important view is a list of translations, every row contains key and related translations in different languages. As this view serves multiple purposes, we have quite a lot of requirements and fulfilling all of them required quite a bit of optimizations, which I'd like to share with you today.

After three weeks of hard work, we finally created, documented and released an integration for Svelte.

I learned a lot about Svelte while creating it, and I have to say, that I love Svelte!

Get started on Tolgee for Svelte!