Developer shares staged approach to adding multilingual support in Expo app

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A developer migrated an Expo mobile app from Japanese-only to supporting Japanese, English, and Simplified Chinese using i18next and react-i18next. Rather than translating everything at once, the work was divided into three stages: laying the foundation, migrating core user flows, and handling remaining screens. Key technical challenges included managing device language detection versus manual user preference, locale-aware date formatting with Intl.DateTimeFormat, and surfacing a navigation bug caused by using display labels as identifiers. API status values were kept in English internally, meaning no database migration was needed when adding new languages. The developer also noted that mobile apps lack URL-based locale options available on the web, requiring a different strategy for language preference storage and detection.

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