React Native - Culture Text

A higher order component of <Text/> to provide i18n features in a react-friendly way

Motivation

Current i18n libraries implement translations in an app-wide manner. This generates a coupling that works againts component isolation. We need a way in which each component can define their owns translations, in a standalone manner. This is somehow similar to the concept handling local styles instead of having global rules.

Goals

dynamically set the content of <Text/> elements depending on the context's culture
message definition and theirs translations live inside each component
allow translations to be implemented with minimum friction of original code

Non-goals

provide a full-blown i18n library
be able to capture device's culture automatically (use your own mechanism for this)

Install

yarn add react-native-culture-text

Getting Started

In your root component, wrap your whole UI with a <CultureContext locale={'es-AR'} /> to tell all the children in the hierarchy what's the current locale of the user.
In each isolated component, wrap your UI with another <CultureContext translations={myTranslations} /> to tell the component's children where to look for translated messages.
Switch your import statements to use the <Text/> component that comes with this library instead of the original react-native one.
To each <Text/> element, add a new attribute messageKey that will be used to select which message translation to use.

Sample

import React, { Component } from 'react';
import {
  AppRegistry,
  StyleSheet,
  View
} from 'react-native';

import {
  CultureContext,
  Text
} from 'react-native-culture-text';

export default class example extends Component {
  render() {
    return (
      <CultureContext translations={translations} locale="es">
        <View style={styles.container}>
          <Text style={styles.welcome}>
            Welcome to React Native!
          </Text>
          <Text messageKey="welcome" style={styles.instructions}>
            This text depends on the selected culture
          </Text>
        </View>
      </CultureContext>
    );
  }
}

const translations = {
  en: {
    welcome: 'This text depends on the selected culture',
  },
  es: {
    welcome: 'Este texto depende de la cultura seleccionada',
  },
}

const styles = StyleSheet.create({
  container: {
    flex: 1,
    justifyContent: 'center',
    alignItems: 'center',
    backgroundColor: '#F5FCFF',
  },
  welcome: {
    fontSize: 20,
    textAlign: 'center',
    margin: 10,
  },
  instructions: {
    textAlign: 'center',
    color: '#333333',
    marginBottom: 5,
  },
});

scarmuega / react-native-culture-text