solo-i18n

# /i18n Take an app from one language to many, and keep it there. Written after shipping 36 languages in an iOS app; the traps below each cost real time and none of them announce themselves — a missed string looks perfect in English. ## The order of work 1. **Humanize the source language first.** Translating is per-language cost: fixing an English sentence after the fact means re-translating it in every language. `/humanize` on the long copy, then translate. 2. **Extract, don't hunt.** Get the platform's extractor to produce the key list. A grep for quoted strings finds prose and misses everything typed wrong (see the type rule below). 3. **Translate in batches**, machine-first, with a validator that refuses a batch dropping a format specifier or a plural category. 4. **Look at it running**, in a right-to-left language and in a long-word language (German, Finnish). A language that is merely declared is not a language that works. ## The type rule — the one that decides everything **Anything a person reads must be typed as the platform's localizable type, not as a plain string.** | Platform | Right | Wrong, and silent | |---|---|---| | SwiftUI | `LocalizedStringKey`, `LocalizedStringResource` | `let title: String` | | React / Next | `t("key")` from the i18n hook | a bare JSX literal in a prop | | Android Compose | `stringResource(R.string.x)` | a `String` constant | The extractor only sees literals in positions typed as localizable. A view property d...