Internationalization and Localization

As you build your Electron application, you'll want to consider reaching a global audience. Internationalization (i18n) and Localization (l10n) are crucial for making your app accessible and user-friendly across different languages and regions. Internationalization is the process of designing your application so that it can be adapted to various languages and regions without engineering changes. Localization is the process of adapting the internationalized application for a specific region and language by translating text and adding locale-specific components.

For Electron applications, we typically handle i18n and l10n by managing language files and dynamically loading them based on the user's system locale or explicit settings. A common approach involves using a library like i18next or react-i18next (if you're using React) in your renderer process and potentially on the main process for messages that need to be displayed in native dialogs or notifications.

Let's explore a common workflow using a simple JSON-based translation system. First, you'll need to structure your translation files. A good practice is to have a dedicated folder for these files, typically named locales or i18n, with subdirectories for each language.

In your renderer process (e.g., in your main JavaScript file or within your framework's initialization), you'll set up your i18n library. Here's a conceptual example using i18next.

Once initialized, you can use translation keys to display text in your UI. The i18next library will automatically pick the correct language based on the lng setting.