Migrate from react-i18next to Intlayer

For a complete and detailed step-by-step tutorial, please see our full react-i18next Migration Guide.

Using Intlayer's compat adapter allows you to migrate from react-i18next without any changes to your source code imports.

What to do

To initialize the project, run:

npx intlayer init

During initialization, Intlayer will install @intlayer/react-i18next and create intlayer.config.ts. In your bundler (like Vite), apply the Intlayer plugin:

import { defineConfig } from "vite";import react from "@vitejs/plugin-react";import { reactI18nextVitePlugin } from "@intlayer/react-i18next/plugin";export default defineConfig({  plugins: [react(), reactI18nextVitePlugin()],});

What it does under the hood

The reactI18nextVitePlugin wraps the core vite-intlayer plugin and injects resolve aliases for react-i18next and i18next, redirecting them to @intlayer/react-i18next and @intlayer/i18next.

Under the hood:

• useTranslation & withTranslation: Rewritten to use Intlayer's native hooks, giving you automatic TypeScript completion for your dictionary keys. It seamlessly supports namespaces (e.g. t('namespace:key')).
• Plurals & Context: Handles i18next's suffix-based pluralization (key_one, key_other) using native Intl.PluralRules and context suffixes (key_male).
• <Trans> Component: Re-implemented to support the components prop, object and array forms, and numbered tags <1>...</1> directly mapping to your React nodes.
• i18n instance: Resolves keys directly from Intlayer without fetching large JSON files, resulting in significantly lower bundle sizes.