I agree that the functionality provided is quite basic, there are quite a few libraries out there that provide much more functionality, such as the one you ment

I agree that the functionality provided is quite basic, there are quite a few libraries out there that provide much more functionality, such as the one you mentioned or http://i18next.com/ http://i18next.com/ I was initially using another tiny library http://airbnb.io/polyglot.js/ http://airbnb.io/polyglot.js/, but we wanted to support translation fallbacks to allow us to put every widget/component in a separate namespace. Which means we don't have to copy translations over unless they are unique, since that became a bit of a maintenance burden as more things are added. We already supported dates by using separate other libraries such as http://momentjs.com/ http://momentjs.com/