i18next translation outside component

Question

I'm new for i18next, trying to localize/translate website. Everything works for translation inside of component, but outside (means json files with i18n.t() it doesn't retrieve needed information, instead showing default value.

I'm using create-react-app and it's default settings for folders reference, maybe this is the key problem, but I can't find out why and what to change.

import i18n from '../../i18n';


const navigation = [
    {
        'id'      : 'dashboard',
        'title'   : i18n.t('analytics.title', 'NOT FOUND'),
        'type'    : 'group',
        'icon'    : 'apps',

    }
  ]

export default navigation;

And here is settings for i18n.js file:

import i18n from "i18next";
import Backend from 'i18next-xhr-backend';
import { initReactI18next } from 'react-i18next';
import detector from "i18next-browser-languagedetector";

i18n

  .use(detector)
  .use(Backend)
  .use(initReactI18next)
  .init({
    lng: localStorage.getItem('language') || 'en',
    backend: {
      /* translation file path */
      loadPath: '/assets/i18n/{{ns}}/{{lng}}.json'
    },
    fallbackLng: ['en', 'se', 'da'],
    debug: true,
    ns: ['translations'],
    defaultNS: 'translations',
    keySeparator: false,
    interpolation: {
      escapeValue: false,
      formatSeparator: ','
    },
    react: {
      wait: true
    }

  })

  export default i18n;

and for index.js:

import 'typeface-muli';
import './react-table-defaults';
import './react-chartjs-2-defaults';
import { I18nextProvider } from "react-i18next";
import i18n from "./i18n";
import './styles/index.css';
import React from 'react';
import ReactDOM from 'react-dom';
import * as serviceWorker from './serviceWorker';
import App from 'app/App';

 ReactDOM.render(
   <I18nextProvider i18n={i18n}>
   <App />
   </ I18nextProvider>
   ,
   document.getElementById('root'));

serviceWorker.unregister();

I'm just getting default : 'NOT FOUND'...

Answer 1

You are using a backend service to fetch translations asynchronously in the browser. When importing i18n you probably expected translation to be readily available, but that's not the case - i18n.init is also an async method (if you try and await it, you'll be able to leverage t function).

One possible approach would be defining a translation key:

const navigation = [
  {
    ...
    'title_key': 'analytics.title',
    ...
  }
]

And later passing it down to t within a component:

navigation.map(({ title_key }) => <li>t(title_key)</li>)