i18next-express-middleware: Importing t() from i18next (instead of from request) is resulting in error "Cannot read property 'translator' of undefined"

I’ve setup i18next with the express-middleware package. Everything works fine with translating strings with the lng and t() function from the request object. However if I import it from the i18next instance itself, I get the error "Cannot read property 'translator' of undefined" when calling t() with my own language string (not importing that from i18next, just passing it in hardcoded).

A console.log(i18next) learns that the import works, I also have a t(), it only not works. The use case for this: i’m having a business layer that data fetching and transformations (like translations) and when doing a business layer to business layer call, I not always have the request object available.