MessageFormat: Unicode standard for localizable message strings

Source: Hacker News

MessageFormat Working Group

Welcome to the home page for the MessageFormat Working Group, a subgroup of the Unicode CLDR‑TC.

Charter

The MessageFormat Working Group (MFWG) is tasked with developing and supporting an industry standard for the representation of localizable message strings. MessageFormat is designed to support software developers, translators, and end users with fluent messages and locally‑adapted presentation for data values while providing a framework for increasingly complex features, such as gender, inflections, and speech.

Our goal is to provide an interoperable syntax, message data model, and associated processing that is capable of being adopted by any presentation framework or programming environment.

The Unicode MessageFormat Standard

The Unicode MessageFormat Standard is a stable part of CLDR. It was approved by the CLDR Technical Committee and is recommended for implementation and adoption. The normative version of the specification is published as a part of TR35. This repository contains the editor’s copy.

Unicode MessageFormat is sometimes referred to as MessageFormat 2.0, since it replaces earlier message formatting capabilities built into ICU. Some default functions and items in the u: namespace are still in Draft status. Feedback from users and implementers might result in changes to these capabilities.

The MessageFormat Working Group and CLDR Technical Committee welcome any and all feedback, including bug reports, implementation reports, success stories, feature requests, requests for clarification, or anything that would be helpful in supporting or enhancing the specification and promoting widespread adoption.

Sharing Feedback

Do you have feedback on the specification or any of its elements? File an issue here.

We invite feedback about implementation difficulties, proposed functions or options, real‑life use‑cases, requirements for future work, tooling, runtime APIs, localization workflows, and other topics.

• General questions and thoughts → post a discussion thread.
• Actionable feedback (bugs, feature requests) → file a new issue.

Participation / Joining the Working Group

We are looking for participation from software developers, localization engineers, and others with experience in Internationalization (I18N) and Localization (L10N). If you wish to contribute to this work, please review the information about the Contributor License Agreement below.

To follow this work:

• Apply to join our mailing list
• Watch this repository (use the “Watch” button in the upper right corner)

To contribute to this work, in addition to the above:

• Each individual must have a copy of the CLA on file. See below.

Individuals who are employees of Unicode Member organizations should contact their member representative. Individuals who are not employees of Unicode Member organizations must contact the chair to request Invited Expert status. Employees of Unicode Member organizations may also apply for Invited Expert status, subject to approval from their member representative.

Copyright & Licenses

Copyright © 2019‑2025 Unicode, Inc. Unicode and the Unicode Logo are registered trademarks of Unicode, Inc. in the United States and other countries.

A CLA is required to contribute to this project – please refer to the CONTRIBUTING.md file (or start a Pull Request) for more information.

The contents of this repository are governed by the Unicode Terms of Use and are released under the LICENSE.