The #1 Reason i18n Fails (So I Built u18n.com for 2025)
Tired of i18n projects failing? We uncover the #1 reason—it's not what you think—and reveal how u18n.com is built to fix the broken workflow for good.
Daniel Peterson
Founder of u18n.com, a developer passionate about fixing broken localization workflows.
I’ve seen it happen a dozen times. A team spends months building a beautiful, sleek application. They’re ready for the big international launch. They check the box for “i18n” by sending a spreadsheet of text strings to a translation agency. The files come back, they plug them in, and… disaster.
The German text for “Submit” is so long it breaks the button. The Japanese translation for a casual greeting sounds like it’s from a corporate legal document. The layout in right-to-left Arabic is completely broken. The team scrambles, patching UI bugs and begging translators for “shorter words.” The launch is delayed, morale plummets, and everyone quietly agrees to never touch the i18n setup again if they can help it.
We often blame the tools, the translators, or the tight deadlines. But after years of wrestling with internationalization, I’m convinced the real problem is something much more fundamental.
The Vicious Cycle of Bad i18n
Most internationalization efforts are doomed from the start because the workflow is fundamentally broken. It’s a painful, disjointed process that creates friction and misunderstanding at every step.
Does this sound familiar?
Step 1: The Developer’s Chore
A developer is tasked with making a component “translatable.” They diligently wrap every user-facing string in a function. {"Welcome, {name}!"} becomes {t("user.greeting.welcome", { name })}. They extract these keys into a JSON or YAML file. Their job is done, or so they think. They have no idea what the French or Korean translation will be, nor how it will affect the UI they just built.
// en.json
{
"user.greeting.welcome": "Welcome, {name}!",
"cta.button.submit": "Submit",
"profile.edit.label": "Edit Profile"
}
From the developer's perspective, this is just an abstraction. The content is now someone else's problem.
Step 2: The Spreadsheet of Doom
A product manager (or an unlucky engineer) exports these keys into a spreadsheet. The keys are in one column, the English source text in another, and empty columns wait for German, Spanish, and Japanese.
This spreadsheet is then emailed to a freelance translator or an agency. In that moment, almost all critical context is vaporized. The key profile.edit.label is just a row in a grid. Is it a button? A page title? A link? A form field label? The translator has no way of knowing.
Step 3: The Translator’s Guessing Game
The translator receives this context-free list and does their best. They have to guess the tone, the spatial constraints, and the user’s intent.
- Does “Submit” mean to submit a form or to submit an article for review? The nuance is different in many languages.
- Is “Welcome” part of a formal onboarding flow or a casual dashboard greeting?
- How much space does the text for
cta.button.submithave? They might provide a beautiful, accurate translation that is twice the length of the English word.
They’re essentially designing a door without knowing if it’s for a dollhouse or a cathedral. The result is a gamble.
Step 4: The Integration Nightmare
The translated spreadsheet comes back. The developer writes a script to convert it back into JSON files, commits them to the repository, and deploys. And that's when the chaos begins.
The UI breaks in three different languages. The tone is wrong. Plurals are handled incorrectly. The QA team files a mountain of tickets. The developer, who has already moved on to the next feature, is dragged back to fix “translation bugs” that aren't really their fault. The cycle of frustration is complete.
The #1 Reason i18n Fails: The Gulf of Context
So, what’s the number one reason i18n fails? It’s the complete separation of translation from its context.
The failure isn't in the code or the final translated word. It's in the vast, empty space between the person who writes the code and the person who writes the words. We treat i18n as a simple find-and-replace operation on strings, but it’s a deep user experience and design problem.
Great localization requires translators to be more than just linguists; they need to be copywriters, UX designers, and product experts. But our workflows force them to work with one hand tied behind their back, blindfolded.
A Better Way: The Vision for u18n.com
I’ve lived through this broken process one too many times. I got so fed up with the spreadsheets, the broken layouts, and the endless back-and-forth that I decided to build the solution I wished I had. That’s why I’m building u18n.com.
The “u” in u18n stands for “unified,” and that’s the core mission: to unify the workflow and bridge the context gap for good. It’s not just another translation management system (TMS). It’s a complete rethinking of the i18n process, designed for modern development teams launching in 2025.
Here’s how it fixes the core problem:
Principle 1: Visual Context is Non-Negotiable
No more spreadsheets. With u18n.com, translators don’t just see a list of keys. They see the application itself. Our SDK captures screenshots of your app and links them directly to the strings. Translators can see exactly where cta.button.submit lives, what it looks like, and how much space it has. They can edit the translation and see an instant visual preview of how it will look in the UI. This eliminates the guesswork entirely.
Principle 2: A Developer-First Workflow
Developers shouldn't have to leave their environment. u18n.com integrates directly with your GitHub repository. New keys are automatically extracted from your code on every push. When translations are updated, the system can automatically open a pull request with the new language files. It’s a seamless CI/CD-native experience. No more manual exporting, importing, or copy-pasting.
Principle 3: A Single Source of Truth
The platform becomes the central hub for everyone involved. Product managers can track the translation status of each feature. Developers can see which keys are missing translations. Translators have all the context, metadata, and comments they need in one place. The endless email chains and out-of-sync spreadsheets are gone forever.
Principle 4: AI-Assisted, Human-Perfected
Let’s be realistic: AI is a powerful tool for i18n. u18n.com uses it to provide instant machine translations to fill the gaps and speed up the process. But we believe high-quality localization requires a human touch. Our platform is designed to empower human translators, giving them AI as a starting point and the visual context they need to refine and perfect the copy, ensuring it resonates with local users.
Reclaiming i18n for 2025 and Beyond
Internationalization doesn’t have to be a source of pain. When done right, it’s one of the highest-leverage ways to grow your business. But to get there, we have to stop focusing only on the code and start fixing the broken human process.
We need to empower our translators with the same context our designers and developers have. We need to automate the tedious manual work and create a seamless flow of information. We need to turn i18n from a technical afterthought into an integrated part of the product development lifecycle.
That's the future we're building with u18n.com. It's a tool born from the very frustrations I've described here, with the simple goal of making global expansion faster, cheaper, and dramatically higher quality.
If you've ever felt the pain of a botched i18n project, you know what I'm talking about. We're preparing for our launch in 2025. I invite you to check out the site and join the waitlist to see how we're finally fixing i18n for good.