For a current project, I’ve been struggling with my language files. They’re all JSON files, and will always fallback to English if translations aren’t available.

My problem is that when a new key is required, I use my english file by default. This leads to situations where my client wants to translate new keys to other languages, and I have to spend time looking at all files, figuring out which keys i haven’t added there.

Essentially I want to get to a point where I can give all the translation files to my client, and he returns them with the translated content.

What do you guys use for managing this? And how would you solve the situation i’ve found myself in.

  • DonWitoA
    3·
    11 months ago

    If you are using TypeScript it’s quite easy to create a system where the type system will enforce the existence of all translations. I think it should be possible to create a similar solution for other languages as well.

    For example:

    const enTranslations = { MENU: ‘’ };

    const plTranslations: typeof enTranslations = { MENU: ‘’ } as const;

    const t = (key: keyof typeof enTranslations) => get language() == ‘pl’ ? plTranslations[key] : enTranslations[key];

    Missing keys will fail compilation. If you want to skip check you can always use //@ts-ignore

    Additionally the type system will enforce only valid translation keys so you won’t be able to make a typo it forget to add English translation.

    • BetaSalmon@lemmy.worldOP
      2·
      11 months ago

      I think I actually just want a system, which will take my English file as the default, and add the missing keys to the rest of the language files.

      • towerful@programming.dev
        3·
        11 months ago

        Perhaps, the “fallback to English translations file at runtime” is obscuring errors.
        Might be worth redefining the system to throw an error when a translation key in the chosen language isn’t found. Even if that’s only done in Dev, whereas the fallback happens in prod.
        This will ensure a translation file has all the keys, even if the values are still default.

        Some tooling for you to easily add a new key, and have it also add that to all language files as [word] or something. So, the English word is still used, but the square brackets shows that it’s untranslated.
        Maybe some tooling to find all values that have the [], to generate a translation to-do list.
        Probably a tool to create a new translation file as well, which would duplicate the English file, but apply the “this is not translated” pattern to all the values

      • DonWitoA
        1·
        11 months ago

        Quite a lot of IDEs will key you just click “add missing properties” action on the translation object to create a language file.

      • pinchcramp@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        1·
        11 months ago

        Obviously I don’t know your codebase but couldn’t you do something like the following?

        function loadTranslations(locale) {
  const fallbackTranslations = require("/i18n/en.json");
  const translations = require(`/i18n/${locale}.json`);
  return {
     ...fallbackTranslations,
    ...translations
  };
}
        • BetaSalmon@lemmy.worldOP
          1·
          11 months ago

          That won’t work quite well because a lot of it is nested. But shouldn’t be too hard to account for that in a couple of lines of code.

          • pinchcramp@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
            2·
            11 months ago

            Yeah, I don’t know the exact structure of your translation files but a deep merge of your fallback files and the requested locale file should be enough.

    • DonWitoA
      1·
      11 months ago

      It’s also quite ready to transform this file to JSON and send it to translators through any service that supports his format.