Internationalization (i18n)

As your app grows, it's wise to internationalize your UI (offer translations for other languages). To help with this, Joystick supports built-in translation support for pages rendered via the res.render() method.

Storing translations

Translation files should be stored in the /i18n folder at the root of your app. Files should be named using a combination of the ISO-693 language code with the ISO-3166 country code (e.g., en-US.js, de-DE.js, es-ES.js, or ja-JP.js). This format is used because it matches the standard used by browsers.

An example /i18n folder might look like this:

/i18n
-- de-DE.js
-- en-GB.js
-- en-US.js
-- es-ES.js
-- jp-JP.js

Above, we have translations for German, English (Great Britain), English (United States), Spanish, and Japanese.

Loading translations

When you render a page via res.render(), Joystick will try to find a matching language file based on the following preference order:

  1. The current user's (if available) language field value.
  2. The browser's navigator.language value.
  3. The config.i18n.default_language (alias: config.i18n.defaultLanguage) value.

If there's a matching language file in the /i18n folder at the root of your app, that file will be loaded.

Matching based on page path

After a language match is found, inside of a language file, Joystick will attempt to match a value on the object exported by the language file matching the path of the page being rendered. For example, if we have a call to res.render() like this:

res.render('ui/pages/profile/index.js');

Joystick will try to find something like this in the matching language file:

const en_US = {
  'ui/pages/profile/index.js': {
    title: 'The Killer App the Internet Always Wanted'
  },
};

export default en_US;

If there's a match, Joystick will only load the translations stored in the value of that key, ignoring the rest of the translation file. In the event that a matching path cannot be found, Joystick will fallback to loading the entire translation file.

Accessing translations

Once a translation file is found, either the subset matching the page path or the entire translation file's contents are mapped over to the window.__joystick_i18n__ value. Internally, @joystick.js/ui looks for this value at mount time and loads it into the i18n value for all components in the current tree.

Inside of a component, then, we can do something like this:

/ui/pages/profile/index.js

import joystick from '@joystick.js/ui';

const Profile = joystick.component({
  css: { ... },
  render: ({ i18n }) => {
    return `
      <div class="page-profile">
        <div class="masthead">
          <h1>${i18n('title')}</h1>
        </div>
      </div>
    `;
  },
});

export default Profile;

In the example above, because our example language file in the previous section had a matching page path for /ui/pages/profile/index.js, we expect the value of that key in the language file to be loaded in the browser. Using the i18n() render method, we pass the name of a key that we want to obtain the translation for relative to that file.

When the above component is rendered, we'd expect to get back some HTML looking like this:

<div class="page-profile">
  <div class="masthead">
    <h1>The Killer App the Internet Always Wanted</h1>
  </div>
</div>
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