Provide an alternative to polyglot library with a library supporting all locales (e.g. intl-messageformat)

[sorjef]

As react-admin uses polyglot library there is no good way to use pluralization feature for many locales. For instance, this is the case with the Ukrainian and Belarussian language. Polyglot simply does not support them. Furthermore, looks like polyglot is no longer actively supported because simple pull requests adding new locales to locale groups are not getting resolved for more than a half-year.

A great solution would be to switch to another library especially as the tree shaking feature has been implemented. A candidate might be intl-messageformat, which is used across many popular and production-ready libraries like react-intl. Furthermore, it uses official Unicode CLDR rules for pluralization as well as other official Unicode specs for locale-specific formatting.

For many use cases, there is simply no alternative ways to achieve desired behavior except forking react-admin and reimplementing i18n. For some languages, a developer can load messages under another locale which has the same pluralization rules as the target one. But this approach cannot be used if it is required to have both the target locale and the implemented locale. This is often the case with Ukrainian, Belarussian, and other Slavic languages. In the polyglot library, there is only 1 applicable pluralization algorithm — Russian plural forms. In Ukraine, it is often required to use both languages for the app Ukrainian and Russian (because of the mostly bilingual community). Hence, described workaround is not applicable.

[sorjef]

As I understand replacing polyglot entirely is a very difficult task. Especially considering that many translation libraries for react-admin depend on it. A good solution might be providing some way for the user to choose another formatter programmatically.

[fzaninotto]

Already discussed in #1099 (comment), and the decision we made was to not implement what you ask. See the related discussion for detailed arguments.

[kopax]

Hi @sorjef I tough you might be interested, we made react-intl function that helps you swap polyglot with react-intl.

I hoped this could be included in react-admin because it was quite easy and only needed one to two extra props.

• GitHub: https://github.com/yeutech-lab/react-admin-intl
• Doc: https://yeutech-lab.github.io/react-admin-intl/

It relies on webpack alias to tweak the import and inject a different translation provider.

The cool part was that react-admin inject a translate object in the context so source to tweak were just two. (Thanks for creating an adapter that was wise!)

It exactly do :

config.resolve.alias['./i18n/TranslationProvider'] = '@yeutech-lab/react-admin-intl/lib/ra-core/i18n/TranslationProvider';
config.resolve.alias['./TranslationContext']  = '@yeutech-lab/react-admin-intl/lib/ra-core/i18n/TranslationContext';

I've already translated EN and FR, but more language are welcome.

This will work as long as this package does not change these two imports. It will less likely happen because the translation system is already done.

/cc @fzaninotto if you do I would gladly want to be informed first, thanks.