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[APPDIR / i18n] How to internationalize slugs?

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Barbary Lion posted this in #help-forum
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Barbary LionOP
Hello everyone!
I am struggling with issue about translating slugs.
My stack contains data from external CMS (that provides translated slugs).
Is there any way to provide translated slugs without creating separate folders for each language?
Currently I am basing on folder:
/app/pl/page.tsx
I would like to have something like: /app/[lng]/page.tsx , that would generate PL and ENG versions of page.tsx (based on data from CMS).
Answered by Eric Burel
and then the middleware let you map multiple URLs to the valid route
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Do you need to internationalise page slugs or provide translated versions of the same page with a locale prefix? Those are two different things
You can localise slugs using middleware rewrites and internationalise your website/app with various approaches
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Barbary LionOP
I need to have different slugs with same templates (page.tsx) and different data (per language from CMS)
Example:
Same template, different data:
/pl/katalog -> article in CMS, language PL
/en/catalog -> article in CMS, language EN

Same template, different data:
/pl/asortyment -> article in CMS, language PL
/en/assortment -> article in CMS, language EN
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Do you have i18n already built inside the app or are you just starting to implement it?
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Barbary LionOP
Not yet
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That's great cause you have a blank slate to work with.

The best i18n solution I can recommend for the app router right now is the "native" one shown in this official example: https://github.com/vercel/next.js/tree/canary/examples%2Fapp-dir-i18n-routing

Once you have this set up you can then add logic inside your middleware to match all your page pathnames and rewrite requests to them in order to internationalise the slugs.
Let me know how it goes and if you encounter any issues along the way ✌🏻
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Barbary LionOP
Starting then, thanks for the github URL.
Topic should stay open for further questions, If everything will pass well, then I'll close it!
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Sounds good to me
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Barbary LionOP
What about further urls?
Example:
/pl/katalog/artykul
/en/catalog/article

and further ... /pl/katalog/artykul/wydarzenia
/pl/catalog/article/events
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I haven't tried yet. I'll stitch up a test repo as soon as I can and I'll let you know.

For now I think you can get the url and generate an array containing all the different segments and then match each one with the corresponding translation from a tree like data structure
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You'd want to store the slugs in a database accessible from a middleware
so typically an Upstash hosted Redis
and do an URL rewrite from there
the idea is that you need a single valid route in your Next.js app, based on your folder structure
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and then the middleware let you map multiple URLs to the valid route
Answer
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so for instance user type "pl-Pl/kurzwa"
but this is just a slug, it should point to a specific page whose id match "kurzwa"
so in a middleware, you check the URL, see "kurzwa", look in your Redis store and see that it matches the article id 42 => rewrite the URL to that
and if you see "pl-PL/santé", you can instead redirect to "pl-PL/kurzwa"
a URL redirect is visible, a URL rewrite is not
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Ooooh, that's way smarter
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to make it easier you can perhaps generate a file at build-time rather than using a Redis
it depends whether you know the URLs or not
yeah it's actually quite common, before middleware people would do that in their proxy server or gateway