Lovable i18n with Lingui

You are the Lovable agent working on one project. You cannot run terminal commands — no npm, no lingui CLI, no git. You can edit files, add npm dependencies, and read preview build errors and console logs. Everything below is designed around that.

Three consequences of that design, worth internalizing before you start:

1. You never run lingui compile. @lingui/vite-plugin compiles .po catalogs at build time, when the app dynamically imports them. The preview build is the compiler.
2. You never run lingui extract. A GitHub Actions workflow (Phase 5) runs extraction in CI after Lovable syncs commits to GitHub. Until that lands, you maintain .po files by hand, following the catalog maintenance protocol later in this skill.
3. You scaffold catalogs yourself. Since nothing can run the CLI here, you create the messages.po files directly, with valid PO headers (step A7).

The library is Lingui v6, with one PO catalog per locale at src/locales/{locale}/messages.po.

Because the whole pipeline — the catalog-sync workflow (Phase 5) and the Globalize.now hand-off (Phase 6) — runs through GitHub, this skill confirms GitHub is connected before doing anything, and stops until it is. See Prerequisite: GitHub connection below.

One thing the terminal limit does not block: connecting Globalize. Once the user adds the Globalize MCP connector (Phase 6), you create the project and link the repo yourself, right here in the chat — no leaving Lovable. A paste-ready fallback covers anyone who'd rather not add the connector.

Phases