Open Obsidian i18n (OO-i18n) is a non-official, community-driven, and non-profit initiative dedicated to building sustainable internationalization (i18n) infrastructure for the Obsidian third-party ecosystem, including plugins, themes, and other configurable extensions.

Our mission:

Make language no longer a barrier to using Obsidian and its ecosystem.

i18n-plus serves two roles:

For third-party developers, i18n-plus provides a lightweight, embeddable i18n layer that enables:

• Complete decoupling of code/configuration and translation
• Minimal integration effort (small adapter + source dictionary)
• Releases independent of translation completion
• Community-driven, continuously evolving localization

Developers only need to provide the source dictionary; the rest can be handled by the community.

For users, i18n-plus offers:

• Visual identification of third-party plugins, themes, and other configurable extensions adapted to i18n-plus
• In-app bridging between extensions and dictionaries
• Dynamic loading and unloading of dictionaries without restart
• Built-in local dictionary editor for personalized translations
• Pre-designed interfaces for future cloud dictionary integration

i18n-plus has been validated in real-world usage with Blur Mode and Better Plugins Manager.

We are building an open, reusable, and evolving community dictionary system to:

• Unify key terminology across the Obsidian ecosystem
• Allow translations to evolve independently from extension versions
• Support collaborative workflows (Crowdin + GitHub)
• Enable one-click dictionary updates inside i18n-plus

The technical interfaces are ready; the dictionary infrastructure is under active development.

Traditional i18n approaches face three major issues:

1. Translation blocks releases
2. Translations are subjective and hard to update
3. Poor iteration due to tight coupling with extension versions

i18n-plus solves these issues with dynamic dictionaries and community-driven translation, making localization faster, more flexible, and sustainable.

After the official Obsidian team declined to host an i18n plugin, the community self-organized and:

• Maintained an independent i18n ecosystem
• Localized hundreds of plugins and themes
• Built a community of nearly 1,000 members

Many potential users are stopped not by features but by language, which motivates our work.

Developers of Plugins, Themes, and Configurable Extensions

• Integrate the i18n-plus adapter into your project
• Provide a source dictionary to the community repository

Translators

• Contribute via Crowdin (coming soon)
• Improve terminology consistency across extensions

Users

• Install i18n-plus
• Use and customize cloud/local dictionaries
• Report issues and suggestions on GitHub

• i18n-plus (Plugin & Framework): https://github.com/open-obsidian-i18n/i18n-plus
• Dictionaries (In Progress): https://github.com/open-obsidian-i18n/dictionaries
• Community Discussions: https://github.com/open-obsidian-i18n/community

This project is open under MIT + CC BY 4.0. You are free to reuse, fork, and reference this work.