title: Angular localize: a duplicated app for every language?
body: <p><a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/46242346/string-resources-in-angular">Some years ago</a> I used <a href="https://github.com/ngx-translate/core" rel="nofollow noreferrer">@ngx-translate</a> for dealing with string replacement in my Angular application.</p>
  <p>Now I need to internationalize my application and although @ngx-translate still seems to be the better choice I would give a chance* to the Angular i18n built-in capabilities.</p>
  <p>I have read the <a href="https://angular.io/guide/i18n" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Angular i18n documentation</a> and it seems to be quite simple to have a translated version of an application (despite the use of XML instead of JSON!).</p>
  <p>As the documentation states:</p>
  <blockquote>
  <p>due to the deployment complexities of i18n and the need to minimize rebuild time, the development server only supports localizing a single locale at a time</p>
  </blockquote>
  <p>In addition I have to build a different app for every language, that results in having duplicated apps:</p>
  <pre><code>ng build --configuration=production,fr
  ng build --configuration=production,es
  ng build --configuration=production,it
  ng build --configuration=production,de
  </code></pre>
  <p>Am I right? Shouldn't we have only one app and as many &quot;message.xlf&quot; files (or something similar) as languages that are loaded at runtime?</p>
  <p>*<em>I have read somewhere that the maintainer of ngx-translate believes that as soon as Angular “catches up”, his solution will be deprecated. In fact, he was hired by the Angular team to work on the I18n module; he states that the built-in solution is much more complex and bug-free. So, while ngx-translate is still being widely used, maybe we should think about transferring to the built-in module sooner or later</em>.</p>