| name | add-translations |
| description | Add or update internationalized (i18n) copy across all locales in this next-intl portfolio. Use whenever introducing or changing any user-facing string, label, section title, or data key. Trigger on "add text", "new copy", "translate", "add a key", "update wording", "i18n", "new section title", or any task that surfaces visible text. |
Adding / updating translations
All user-facing text in this project comes from next-intl catalogs in messages/. There are 12 locale files that MUST stay in sync.
Locales (keep all in sync)
en, es, fr, it, pt, ru, ja, ko, zh, ar, hi, de — defined in src/i18n/routing.ts. en.json is the source of truth.
Steps to add a key
- Decide the namespace + key path (e.g.
About.title, Projects.cards.felis.description). Mirror the existing nesting structure.
- Add the key to every file in
messages/*.json with the same path. Provide a real translation per language; if a translation is unknown, use the English value as a placeholder and flag it.
- Read the string in code:
- Server Component:
const t = await getTranslations("Namespace"); then t("key").
- Client Component (
"use client"): const t = useTranslations("Namespace"); then t("key").
- For nested namespaces, scope directly:
useTranslations("Projects.cards").
Data-driven keys
Files in src/data/*.json reference translations by key (e.g. titleKey: "projects.felis.title"). When adding a data entry, add the matching title/subtitle/description keys under the right namespace in all locale files.
Rules
- Never hardcode user-facing strings in components.
- Never add a key to only some locale files — all 12 or none.
- Preserve placeholders/ICU syntax (
{name}) identically across locales.
- For links use the wrappers from
@/i18n/navigation, not raw next/link.
Verify
- Run
npm run lint and ideally npm run build; missing keys in a locale will surface at runtime as the raw key.
