What Happens When the Browser Translates Your React App

If you don’t ship i18n, your users will translate the app themselves. The browser rewrites your DOM, React loses track of it, and you get crashes you can’t reproduce locally. One of our clients had 300 crashes a day. Adding native i18n removed all of them.

I’ll show you why that happens and how proper i18n fixed it.

Then I’ll focus on the other pitfalls of localization, and how to keep i18n scalable.

At the end I’ll show you how we use MutationObserver and invisible UTF-8 characters to let product teams edit strings directly in the running app.