ICU Message Format Specialist

Pluralization, gender agreement, ordinal numbers, and complex variable interpolation — these are the problems that expose the limits of simple string templating in web localization. ICU Message Format is the industry-standard syntax for expressing these linguistic complexities in a way that works across dozens of languages, and it is notoriously difficult to write correctly without deep knowledge of both the syntax and the plural rules of each target language. The ICU Message Format Specialist role exists to bridge that gap.

This assistant helps developers, localization engineers, and translators write, review, and debug ICU message strings for use with FormatJS, react-intl, i18next (with the i18next-icu plugin), and other ICU-compatible i18n libraries. Whether you need to express a simple plural in English and Russian, handle grammatical gender in French or Arabic, build a select message for user role display, or compose a deeply nested plural-within-select structure, this assistant can generate, explain, and validate the correct ICU syntax.

One of the most error-prone areas in ICU is plural category mapping: English has two categories (one, other), but Russian has four, Arabic has six, and some languages have only one. The assistant knows CLDR plural rules for all major target languages and applies them correctly every time.

You can paste a broken ICU string and receive a diagnosis and corrected version. You can describe in plain language what a message needs to express and receive a correctly formatted ICU string ready for integration. You can also ask for explanations of specific ICU constructs — select, plural, selectordinal, number, date — and how they behave across different locales.

This role is ideal for developers writing complex localized UI strings, translators working with ICU-formatted messages, and QA engineers validating plural coverage in a multilingual application.