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🌐 i18n Assistance

This document aims to augment that which appears in the goi18n project and provide information that can help the client use the i18n functionality defined there and its integration into this template project. The translations process is quite laborious, so this project tries alleviate this process by providing helper tasks which will be documented here also.

📁 Directory Structure

The local directory structure is as follows:

  • default: contains the translation file created by the newt (new translation task). Actually, this task creates an active file (active.en-GB.json) in the i18n/out folder, the result of which needs to be manually copied into the active file in the default folder.

  • deploy: contains all the translations files that are intended to be deployed with the application. There will be one per supported language and by default this template project includes a translation file for en-US (lorax.active.en-US.json)

⚙️ Translation Workflow

✨ New Translations

goi18n instructs the user to manually create an empty translation message file that they want to add (eg translate.en-US.json). This is taken care of by the newt task. Then the requirement is to run the goi18n merge <active> command (goi18n merge lorax.active.en-US.json lorax.translate.en-US.json). This has been wrapped up into the merge task and the result is that the translation file lorax.translation.en-US.json is populated with the messages to be translated. So the sequence goes:

  • run newt task: (generates default language file ./i18n/out/active.en-GB.json and empty ./i18n/out/us-US/lorax.translation.en-US.json file). This task can be run from the root folder, goi18n will recursively search the directory tree for files with translate-able content, ie files with template definitions (i18n.Message)
  • run merge task: derives a translation file for the requested language en-US using 2 files as inputs: source active file (./i18n/out/active.en-GB.json) and the empty en-US translate file (./i18n/out/us-US/lorax.translation.en-US.json), both of which were generated in the previous step.
  • hand the translate file to your translator for them to translate
  • rename the translate file to the active equivalent (lorax.translation.en-US.json). Save this into the deploy folder. This file will be deployed with the application.

🧩 Update Existing Translations (⚠️ not finalised)

goi18n instructs the user to run the following steps:

  1. Run goi18n extract to update active.en.toml with the new messages.
  2. Run goi18n merge active.*.toml to generate updated translate.*.toml files.
  3. Translate all the messages in the translate.*.toml files.
  4. Run goi18n merge active.*.toml translate.*.toml to merge the translated messages into the active message files.

The above description is way too vague and ambiguous. It is for this reason that this process has not been finalised. The intention will be to upgrade the instructions as time goes by and experience is gained.

However, in this template, the user can execute the following steps:

  • run task update: this will re-extract messages into active.en-GB.json and then runs merge to create an updated translate file.
  • hand the translate file to your translator for them to translate
  • as before, this translated file should be used to update the active file lorax.active.en-US.json inside the deploy folder.

🎓 Task Reference

❗This is a work in progress ...

💤 extract

Scans the code base for messages and extracts them into out/active.en-GB.json (The name of the file can't be controlled, it is derived from the language specified). No need to call this task directly.

💠 newt

Invokes the extract task to extract messages from code. After running this task, the translate.en-US.json file is empty ready to be used as one of the inputs to the merge task (why do we need an empty input file for the merge? Perhaps the input file instructs the language tag to goi18n).

Inputs:

  • source code

Outputs:

  • ./i18n/out/active.en-GB.json (messages extracted from code, without hashes)
  • ./i18n/out/en-US/translate.en-US.json (empty)

💠 merge

Inputs:

  • ./i18n/out/active.en-GB.json
  • ./i18n/out/en-US/lorax.translate-en-US.json

Outputs:

  • ./i18n/out/active.en-US.json
  • ./i18n/out/translate.en-US.json