TL;DR Make sure you’re raising an error in test and development environments if there is a translation missing. Below there are a couple of thoughts and examples.

Intro

It’s 2017: we are using microservices, shipping APIs and building Progressive Web Apps. But it can’t ease the pain of a real user when our web app is missing translations:

Runtastic

Strava

Groupon

You can find thousands of examples here.

What can possibly go wrong?

The worst case – you’re sending multi-language emails using your app, so your copy lives in locale files. No matter which translation is missing in this part – it will be sent to every user of your app.

Next actions

If you’re using Rails just go to your env/test.rb and env/development.rb and uncomment:

config . action_view . raise_on_missing_translations = true

Merry Christmas!