Why Alibaba’s Open‑Source Kiwi Solves the Full‑Cycle i18n Pain Points

Overview

Kiwi is an open‑source project from Alibaba that provides a complete internationalization (i18n) solution covering the entire process from design to release.

Why use Kiwi?

Common i18n libraries such as react‑intl and I18N‑loader handle language switching but have several shortcomings:

After replacing text with i18n keys, the original wording becomes hard to search and is not intuitive.

Extracting Chinese strings embedded in code is difficult.

Developers cannot easily determine whether any Chinese text remains un‑extracted.

Beyond these technical gaps, the i18n workflow often involves multiple stakeholders. Existing tools do not support exporting strings for translators, nor do they help UI designers handle unknown string lengths before translations are available. Kiwi was created to fill these gaps.

Feature Demonstration

1. One‑click Chinese string extraction

The CLI can scan the codebase and extract all Chinese literals into a structured file.

2. Detect Chinese strings in code

Kiwi’s linter highlights files that still contain Chinese literals, allowing developers to locate and address them quickly.

3. Search corresponding strings

A built‑in search feature lets users jump directly from a string key to its occurrence in the source code.

Translation Workflow

During translation, the CLI can automatically extract untranslated terms into an Excel file for collaboration with translators. While waiting for official translations, Kiwi provides scripts that call Google and other translation platforms to generate temporary translations, reducing UI adjustment effort.

After translations are finalized, a one‑click import command injects the localized strings back into the project files.

Additional Tooling

Kiwi includes a TSLint plugin that warns developers in real time about un‑extracted strings and blocks commits that contain non‑i18n code, ensuring code quality throughout the development cycle.

Open‑Source Repository

Source code and documentation are available at https://github.com/alibaba/kiwi