Not too often I post about work, but a piece of work I’ve been involved in for most of this year has finally been released: You can now translate every single text string in the http://GOV.UK Design System. All of ‘em!
https://github.com/alphagov/govuk-frontend/releases/tag/v4.4.0
"Big whoop," you may think, "you just replaced hardcoded strings with variables."
In some cases, yes. In others, we had to work around hardcoded string interpolation, devise methods of swapping out strings based on other variables, standardise new APIs to do all this with...
Oh, and also it had to work in a way that's backwards compatible with hundreds of existing http://GOV.UK services (some of them partially translated), be WCAG 2.1 AA compilant, and… most painfully of all, it even works in Internet Explorer 8.
It's not fully fledged, by any means. We've done what was required for our existing components and for future-proofing.
Unfortunately things like full RTL language support (which I'd have *loved* to do) hit the cutting room floor early on.
@batbeeps that rules! i've worked on localization processes and they're nothing to take lightly 💖