How do I publish translations so my app uses them?

Publishing is the step that makes a translation real to your app. Until you publish, everything you have written lives in the dashboard only.

There is no build and no deploy in between.

What happens #

Code

Publish
  → translations are written to the CDN origin
  → the cache is purged for what changed
  → your app fetches the new version on its next request

Doing it #

Open your project
Click Publish
Read what it lists — this is the important part
Confirm

The popover lists exactly what is about to go live, grouped so you can see it rather than trust a count.

Read the list before you confirm #

Drafts publish too. This surprises people, so it is worth being blunt: the publish action includes both approved translations and drafts. The API's own default is approved-only, and the dashboard deliberately widens it so that what the popover lists is what actually ships — a count of "12 ready" that publishes 9 would be worse.

The consequence: draft does not mean "cannot go live". It means "nobody has vouched for this yet". If you need approval to be a real gate, review before publishing rather than relying on the status to hold things back. See How do I review and approve translations?.

How long until visitors see it #

The CDN serves translations with a one-minute cache, and publishing purges what changed — so the usual answer is seconds, and one minute is the ceiling.

Layers that can add their own delay:

Layer	Delay
CDN edge	Purged on publish; `max-age=60` otherwise
SDK in-memory cache	Up to its refresh interval
Next.js ISR	Whatever `revalidate` you set

If your app renders translations at build time or caches them for an hour, that is your number, not ours. I published but my app still shows old translations walks through finding which layer is holding on.

From the CLI #

Bash

better-i18n publish:status   # what would go live right now
better-i18n publish          # do it

publish:status is worth running first in a pipeline, and it is the honest answer to "is there anything pending".

There is no rollback #

Publishing is not versioned and there is no snapshot to restore. Fixing a bad publish means editing the translation and publishing again — which takes about a minute, so it is rarely a crisis, but it does mean the review happens before the button, not after.

Every publish is recorded as a job you can inspect: