Use variable language specific strings in hugo config file - hugo

Question

My goal is to build a multilingual site using hugo. For this I would like to:
not touch the theme file
have a config file which defines the overall structure for all languages (config.toml)
have a "string" file for all languages
So for example, I would have a config.toml file like this:
[params.navigation]
brand = "out-website"
[params.navigation.links]
about = $ABOUT_NAME
services = $SERVICES_NAME
team = $TEAM_NAME
impressum = $IMPRESSUM_NAME
a english language file:
ABOUT_NAME=About
SERVICES_NAME=Services
TEAM_NAME=Team
IMPRESSUM_NAME=Impressum
and a german language file like this:
ABOUT_NAME=Über uns
SERVICES_NAME=Dienste
TEAM_NAME=Mitarbeiter
IMPRESSUM_NAME=Impressum
And then I want to compile the project for english, I do something along the line of:
hugo --theme=... --config=config.toml --config=english.toml
and german:
hugo --theme=... --config=config.toml --config=german.toml
Or in same similar way.
For this I need to use variables in the config.toml that are defined in english.toml or german.toml
My google search so far say, that I cannot use variables in toml.
So is there a different approach with which I could achieve this?

Answer 1

Your approach with variables is not optimal, use the tutorial below.
Multilingual sites are coming as a feature on Hugo 0.16, but I managed to build a multilingual site on current Hugo using this tutorial and some hacks.
The tutorial above requires to "have a separate domain name for each language". I managed to bypass that and to have to sites, one at root (EN), and one in the folder (/LT/).
Here are the steps I used.
Set up reliable build runner, you can use Grunt/Gulp, but I used npm scripts. I hacked npm-build-boilerplate and outsourced rendering from Hugo. Hugo is used only to generate files. This is important, because 1) we will be generating two sites; 2) hacks will require operations on folders, what is easy on npm (I'm not proficient on building custom Grunt/Gulp scripts).
Set up config_en.toml and config_de.toml in root folder as per tutorial.
Here's excerpt from my config_en.toml:
contentdir = "content/en"
publishdir = "public"
Here's excerpt from my config_lt.toml (change it to DE in your case):
contentdir = "content/lt"
publishdir = "public/lt"
Basically, I want my website.com to show EN version, and website.com/lt/ to show LT version. This deviates from tutorial and will require hacks.
Set up translations in /data folder as per tutorial.
Bonus: set up snippet on Dash:
{{ ( index $.Site.Data.translations $.Site.Params.locale ).#cursor }}
Whenever I type "trn", I get the above, what's left is to paste the key from translations file and I get the value in correct language.
Hack part. The blog posts will work fine on /lt/, but not static pages (landing pages). I use this instruction.
Basically, every static page, for example content/lt/duk.md will have slug set:
slug: "lt/duk"
But this slug will result in double URL path, for example lt/lt/duk.
I restore this using my npm scripts task using rsync and manual command to delete redundant folder:
"restorefolders": "rsync -a public/lt/lt/ public/lt/ && rm -rf public/lt/lt/",