When working with i18n content, even small changes in a field require reprocessing the entire content for translation. This becomes inefficient for large texts or frequent updates.

It would be useful to introduce a digest (hash) mechanism per i18n field, allowing plugins and integrations to detect whether content has actually changed.

Proposed behavior:

Each localized field stores a digest (e.g., hash of content)

Digest updates only when the field content changes

Plugins (like translation tools) can compare digests to perform incremental translation, skipping unchanged content

Benefits:

Avoid unnecessary re-translation of unchanged content

Reduce API usage and costs for AI translation services

Improve performance for large datasets and frequent edits

Enable smarter caching strategies for localization workflows

Use case:

In AI-powered translation workflows, this allows processing only modified fields instead of re-translating entire entries after minor edits.

This would improve the ecosystem for translation plugins and localization workflows in Strapi.

I’ve been exploring this approach while building a translation plugin https://github.com/l10n-dev/strapi-plugin-ai-translator , and it significantly improves efficiency.