I have finally managed to set up a multilingual cakephp site.
Although not finished it is the first time where I can change the DEFAULT_LANGUAGE in the bootstrap and I can see the language to change.
My problem right now is that I cannot understand very well how to use the po files correctly.
According to the tutorials I've used I need to create a folder /app/locale and inside that folder create a folder for each language in the following format: /locale/eng/LC_MESSAGES.
I have done that and I have also managed to extract a default.pot file using cake i18n extract. And it appears that all occurrences of the __() function have been found succesfully.
In my application I'm using 2 languages: eng and gre.
I can see why you would need a seperate folder for each language.
However in my case nothing happens when I edit the po files inside each folder....well almost nothing. If I edit the /app/locale/gre/LC_MESSAGES/default.po I have no language changes. If I edit the /app/locale/eng/LC_MESSAGES/default.po then the language changes to the new value (on the translation field) and it does not switch to the other language.
What am I doing wrong.
I hope I made myself as clear as possible.
There are different ways to go about it. The easiest is to code the app in the primary language and to just wrap all translatable strings in __(). Later you can add .po files for each translation you may want.
The problem with this approach is that if you were to change the text in the original language, you'll also need to change the msgid entry for this string in every .po file you may have. This can become quite cumbersome if you have to support many different languages.
Please disregard the old information above. A properly set up i18n workflow will use xgettext or similar utilities to automatically extract __() wrapped strings from the source code and produce, update and merge .po files. Nothing cumbersome about it.
The alternative is to use a "descriptor" text in the source files and put the actual text in .po files, even for the primary language. I.e:
__('PRODUCT CAPTION');
/eng/.po
msgid "PRODUCT CAPTION"
msgstr "Buy our awesome products!"
/ger/.po
msgid "PRODUCT CAPTION"
msgstr "Kaufen Sie unsere Produkte!"
What works better depends on the project and on you, you'll have to figure it out...
Use
Configure::write('Config.language', 'fr');
to set the language of the user to french.
Related
My website needs to be able to support multiple languages for multiple countries. For example, the US might have English and Spanish, while the UK might only have English. If two countries use the same language, it DOES NOT mean the content is the same.
For this reason, I decided to use the internationalization module (i18n) and I created language codes as follows:
gb-en - UK English
us-en - US English
us-es - US Spanish
I set this up with no issues, but my problem comes in with creating all the default content. For each content type, I want to:
Set the content types default language as "English"
Create translated versions of each content type for each language
I know this will mean that the Spanish content would still be in English, but it's the first step towards translating it.
What is the easiest way to create all these "default" content pages?
You could create a module implementing hook_node_insert(). This module would intercept the creation of a new node (stored with the default language) and create as many copies as needed. Each of these copies should have a different value in the field language. These copies colud be easily stored in the dabase using node_save() function.
I am creating a website using CakePHP that requires translation not only into multiple languages but also multiple phrases per language depending on the type of the logged in user. This will allow the same functionality but with more formal or more friendly language without duplication.
As a very simple example:
Type 1: "Customer", "purchase","shopping cart"
Type 2: "Client", "buy", "basket"
Type 3: "User", "order","invoice"
Each of these types would be available in multiple languages.
I've got the standard localization working in CakePHP (one of the reasons I chose it!) and have the appropriate default.po files in the /Locale/[lang]/LC_MESSAGES/ directory and all is working fine there (thank you to the user who noted on this site that ger needed to be deu to work ;) ).
Before I get too far into the app I'd like to add the phrasing so I can set e.g. the language as French and phrasing as type2. If I was doing this outside of a framework I'd have a matrix look-up to find the correct string based on language and phrase keys but am unsure of how to do this within CakePHP's localization.
Currently I'm using the standard __([string]) convention but as this is early in the development cycle it would be trivial to change if necessary.
I was considering using __d([phrase],[string]) but can't see how to set this without creating my app as a plugin and then I'm back to the same problem with /Locale/
I have been unable to find any example of this in my searches on SO or the cakePHP community sites so would be grateful for any suggestions.
Is there a standard way to do this within cakePHP? if not, what would be a good "best practice" way to implement this?
Edit - following the answer below here's how it was implemented:
in /app/Locale/[lang]/LC_MESSAGES/ I created a new .po files with the new phrasing in them as phrase1.po, phrase2.po etc.
Where I set the language I also set the phrasing where the phrase file matches the name of the po file:
Configure::write('Config.language', 'deu');
Configure::write('App.langDomain', 'phrase1');
and all strings were wrapped with:
__d(Configure::read('App.langDomain', 'string')
And it just works.
Use __d() like this:
__d(Configure::read('App.langDomain'), 'Some string');
In bootstrap.php check the conditions and set App.langDomain based on whatever you need.
__d() has nothing to do with plugins, you can use it everywhere.
And alternative would be to wrap your translations with a custom method, something like
__dd(Configure::read('App.langDomain'), array('foo' => __('String1', 'bar' => __('String2'));
The array is an array of langDomain => stringForThatDomain mappings. Your __dd() method would take the one that is passed in the first argument.
I am developing an application in cakephp 2.3.4, Which is multi-language.
Admin can add any number of new languages.
My question is, When admin decides to add a new language, how resulting locale name should be defined.
Can a locale name be any arbitrary name, given by admin or it should be a dropdown containg all languages code according to language.
Unfortunately, your question is a bit 'vague', i.e., will administrators be able to add GNU-locale files (*.po), or are you talking about adding translations inside the database.
In any case, CakePHP uses locales according to the ISO 639-3 standard see here and here for more information. A complete list of those locales can be found inside the I10n class.
Since you probably also want to switch the locale of PHP itself when switching locales, so that, for example, date, money and time-formats will follow the right format for the locale, it's best to stick with those locales and not 'invent' your own locales.
See setlocale(). Be aware though, that PHP may use slightly different locale-codes than CakePHP uses. And it will depend on what locales are installed on your server.
To get a list of locales installed on your server, use locale -a on the command line. See this page for more information: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Locale
Which techniques to use for localization
A quick summary of techniques to use;
Short messages (interface/UI)
In general, locale files are used for short pieces of text. Locale-files are therefore mostly used for fixed strings,
for example, strings that are used in the interface (like 'are you sure you want to delete this file?' => 'weet u zeker dat u dit bestand wilt verwijderen?).
Longer (fixed) text
For longer pieces of text in your application, that are not part of the 'content' (not the blog-post, but for example a fixed page with a disclaimer),
it's best to use separate views for translated content, for example;
app/Views/MyController/disclaimer_eng.ctp
app/Views/MyController/disclaimer_deu.ctp
app/Views/MyController/disclaimer_fre.ctp
Content
For the content of your website (the part of your website that is managed by the 'user' of the website),
put translations inside the database. This data may be updated frequently and all translations should be updated as well.
How to implement this, is really up to you and depends on your situation. CakePHP offers a Translate behavior that you can use (http://book.cakephp.org/2.0/en/core-libraries/behaviors/translate.html), but in most of my situations that behavior didn't really fit our needs (IMO it is not very efficient, because it stores translations per-field, per-model).
I'm just beginning the process of exploring i18n in CakePHP and I can't seem to find the right combination of files and functions that will allow me to use multiple po files. If I want to use a single po file (default.po) for every bit of translatable text, that works fine, but I see that becoming an unmaintainable hairball very, very quickly. I've read the docs and the few articles I can find, but none really dive into i18n beyond the trivial use of one .po file.
Here's where I am right now:
I've "baked" my po templates (.pot files) and copied those into app/locale/eng/LC_MESSAGES (I'm not going to be using the default text as the key so that I can easily spot missing keys). For now, I have -views-layouts-default.po and -views-pages-index.po.
In those .po files, I've entered the text I want to use for each key.
In my homepage (views/pages/index.ctp) and default layout (views/layouts/default.ctp) I've wrapped the text key I want to translate with the __() function.
When I load the homepage, though, all I see are they keys. No text has been translated. If I throw up a default.po file, though, any keys I drop in there are populated just fine. I'm clearly missing some piece of the puzzle, but I can't find it. Any help would be much appreciated.
Thanks.
I found the piece I was missing thanks to the CakePHP Google Group. I had been playing with the __d() convenience function, but didn't have a clear picture of how to tie it together to my .po files. The answer is easy once you know it:
The domain translation:
__d ( 'login', 'PLEASE_LOGIN' );
Will look for the "PLEASE_LOGIN" key in the file named login.po. I didn't know (and hadn't read anywhere) that domain == po file name (without extension). Learning that made all the difference.
A friend of mine is now building a web application with J2EE and Struts, and it's going to be prepared to display pages in several languages.
I was told that the best way to support a multi-language site is to use a properties file where you store all the strings of your pages, something like:
welcome.english = "Welcome!"
welcome.spanish = "¡Bienvenido!"
...
This solution is ok, but what happens if your site displays news or something like that (a blog)? I mean, content that is not static, that is updated often... The people that keep the site have to write every new entry in each supported language, and store each version of the entry in the database. The application loads only the entries in the user's chosen language.
How do you design the database to support this kind of implementation?
Thanks.
Warning: I'm not a java hacker, so YMMV but...
The problem with using a list of "properties" is that you need a lot of discipline. Every time you add a string that should be output to the user you will need to open your properties file, look to see if that string (or something roughly equivalent to it) is already in the file, and then go and add the new property if it isn't. On top of this, you'd have to hope the properties file was fairly human readable / editable if you wanted to give it to an external translation team to deal with.
The database based approach is useful for all your database based content. Ideally you want to make it easy to tie pieces of content together with their translations. It only really falls down for all the places you may want to output something that isn't out of a database (error messages etc.).
One fairly old technology which we find still works really well, is to use gettext. Gettext or some variant seems to be available for most languages and platforms. The basic premise is that you wrap your output in a special function call like so:
echo _("Please do not press this button again");
Then running the gettext tools over your source code will extract all the instances wrapped like that into a "po" file. This will contain entries such as:
#: myfolder/my.source:239
msgid "Please do not press this button again"
msgstr ""
And you can add your translation to the appropriate place:
#: myfolder/my.source:239
msgid "Please do not press this button again"
msgstr "s’il vous plaît ne pas appuyer sur le bouton ci-dessous à nouveau"
Subsequent runs of the gettext tools simply update your po files. You don't even need to extract the po file from your source. If you know you may want to translate your site down the line, then you can just use the format shown above (the underscored function) with all your output. If you don't provide a po file it will just return whatever you put in the quotes. gettext is designed to work with locales so the users locale is used to retrieve the appropriate po file. This makes it really easy to add new translations.
Gettext Pros
Doesn't get in your way while coding
Very easy to add translations
PO files can be compiled down for speed
There are libraries available for most languages / platforms
There are good cross platform tools for dealing with translations. It is actually possible to get your translation team set up with a tool such as poEdit to make it very easy for them to manage translation projects
Gettext Cons
Solves your site "furniture" needs, but you would usually still want a database based approach for your database driven content
For more info on gettext see this wikipedia page
They way I have designed the database before is to have an News-table containing basic info like NewsID (int), NewsPubDate (datetime), NewsAuthor (varchar/int) and then have a linked table NewsText that has these columns: NewsID(int), NewsText(text), NewsLanguageID(int). And at last you have a Language-table that has LanguageID(int) and LanguageName(varchar).
Then, when you want to show your users the news-page you do:
SELECT NewsText FROM News INNER JOIN NewsText ON News.NewsID = NewsText.NewsID
WHERE NewsText.NewsLanguageID = <<Session["UserLanguageID"]>>
That Session-bit is a local variable where you store the users language when they log in or enters the site for the first time.
Java web applications support internationalization using the java standard tag library.
You've really got 2 problems. Static content and dynamic content.
for static content you can use jstl. It uses java ResourceBundles to accomplish this. I managed to get a Databased backed bundle working with the help of this site.
The second problem is dynamic content.
To solve this problem you'll need to store the data so that you can retrieve different translations based on the user's Locale. (Locale includes Country and Language).
It's not trivial, but it is something you can do with a little planning up front.
#Auron
thats what we apply it to. Our apps are all PHP, but gettext has a long heritage.
Looks like there is a good Java implementation
Tag libraries are fine if you're using JSP, but you can also achieve I18N using a template-based technology such as FreeMarker.