[OpenLayers-Dev] status of translation possibilities

[Gertjan van Oosten]

As quoted from Christopher Schmidt <crschmidt at metacarta.com>:
> It needs to be more complex than this to support interpolation, and I
> think it will need to: as the RFC says:
[ http://trac.openlayers.org/wiki/RFC/Internationalization ]
> "The OpenLayers.String object will have an additional function,
> translate. Translate will accept a translation key -- a single string
> which can be used to look up the string -- and any number of additional
> arguments. If additional arguments are passed, they will be interpolated
> in the string in order."
> 
> MapBuilder already has some code that does this, so we can work with
> them to integrate those bits of it into OpenLayers.  

As I wrote on the I18N thread mid-July (see below), OpenLayers can just
copy the interpolation function I wrote for MapBuilder.  So
interpolation capabilities are more or less a given.  The only question
remaining is how to get the i18n'ed strings into (and out of) the
Openlayers code.  I have never come across a real-life use case where
you would want i18n data to be displayed in mixed-language in one
application, so a single, global language setting would suffice for the
majority of cases.

Note that even when you have i18n texts, you still need to take into
account that the developer adding new strings to the code and the people
doing the translation thereof into the other supported languages are
generally not the same.  Which means you need some sort of fall-back
mechanism for message keys that remain as yet untranslated.  In
MapBuilder the fall back is on the default language "en".

To start off, I guess simple language tags ("en", "nl", "fr", ...) will
suffice.  If and when people want to support language subtags ("en-GB",
"en-US", "nl-NL", "nl-BE", "fr-FR", "fr-CA", ...) you should also
incorporate a fall back from the subtagged language on the more general
language tag.  For MapBuilder this is still on my TODO list; there has
been no demand for it yet.

[See http://communitymapbuilder.org/display/MAP/Add+Translations
 for complete information on how MapBuilder does things.]

Anyway, to quote myself on interpolation ;-) :


[...] the function mbFormatMessage() I wrote, copied below from
trunk/lib/util/Util.js for your convenience, can be used straight
out-of-the-box to get simple interpolation.  Since at the top of the
file it clearly states that it is LGPL, nothing is stopping you. 8-)

  /**
   * Format a message with the extra arguments. <br/>
   * E.g. if called as: <code>mbFormatMessage("{1} is {0} {2}, {1}", "a good", "this", "test")</code><br/>
   * the formatted message returned is: <code>"this is a good test, this"</code>
   * @param messageFormat the message format string
   * @param varArgs       optional extra parameters for formatting the message
   * @return              the formatted message
   */
  function mbFormatMessage(messageFormat)
  {
    var message = messageFormat;
    var varArgs = [].slice.call(arguments, mbFormatMessage.length);
    for (var i in varArgs) {
      var parm = new RegExp("\\{" + i + "\\}", "g");
      message = message.replace(parm, varArgs[i]);
    }
    return message;
  }


Regards,
-- 
-- Gertjan van Oosten, gertjan at West.NL, West Consulting B.V., +31 15 2191 600