i18n Readiness Review Skill

Localizing a product that isn't internationalized fails expensively — translators hit hard-coded strings, layouts break on longer languages, dates show in the wrong format, and RTL shatters the UI. i18n is the engineering groundwork; localization is the content. This skill audits whether the product is ready, so you fix the foundations before paying to translate into the cracks.

Required Inputs

Ask for these only if they aren't already provided:

• The product — web/app/codebase, stack/framework (i18n tooling differs).
• Target languages — especially if any need RTL (Arabic/Hebrew), CJK (Chinese/Japanese/Korean), or are long (German/Finnish).
• What you can share — code snippets, UI screenshots, or a description of how strings/formatting are handled today.

Output Format

i18n Readiness: [product]

A readiness audit across the dimensions that break localization, each with status (🟢 ready / 🟡 partial / 🔴 blocker) and the fix:

Dimension	Check	Status	Fix
String externalization	no user-facing text hard-coded; all in resource files / i18n keys		move strings to a catalog; no concatenated sentences
Formatting	dates, numbers, currency, plurals via locale-aware libs (Intl/ICU)		use Intl/ICU; never string-format dates
Pluralization	plural rules handled (not count + " items")		ICU plural categories (some langs have 4–6)
Layout/expansion	UI tolerates ~+30–40% text length; no fixed-width truncation		flexible layouts, no text baked into images
Encoding	UTF-8 throughout; CJK renders		UTF-8 end to end