Bilingual by Design
· 7 min read
Curling IO serves hundreds of clubs across Canada, where English and French aren't optional, they're official languages. A club in Quebec needs a fully French experience. A national organization like Curling Canada needs both. Rails has mature i18n support and Version 2 has been fully bilingual from the start, but after a decade of maintaining around 10,000 YAML translation keys, we've hit the limits of what that approach can catch: missing keys, missing translations, and unused keys that accumulate silently over time.
In Version 3, we wanted compile-time guarantees that make those problems impossible. This post covers how we designed the i18n system, why we split it into two layers, and what we changed from Version 2.