Building clean multilingual routes with Next.js

How locale-prefixed routes keep the app predictable while still supporting translated content.

Updated Sep 23, 20266 min read

The frontend uses a locale segment at the top of the App Router tree. That gives every public page a predictable URL such as /en/forum or /de/forum.

The locale layout also controls text direction, so Arabic can render right-to-left without duplicating the page implementation.

Keeping locale handling close to routing makes it easier to add SEO metadata, translated navigation, and language switching later.