I'm currently migrating a web application from a database-based internationalization approach (each word having an entry in the translation table, and the actual translation) to one based on Zend_Translate and CSV files.
I need to provide a end-user friendly way to update those translations quickly and easily. Ideally, to minimize the risk of breaking stuff, users would not edit the CSV files directly, but be shown a nice form with fields.
Do you know a standalone, PHP-based, end-user compatible translation frontend that supports one of the adapters Zend_Translate has to offer - ideally gettext or csv?
Something like Python's/Django's Rosetta but in PHP? Rosetta does exactly what I need:
but I would very much like to stay with PHP here for server setup reasons.
SimplePO looks like it goes in the right direction, but is too simple - it doesn't seem to be able to handle multiple languages and catalogs, and plurals.
I have not seen another one and probably for the following reason. In spite of what it says on the SimplePO web site translators do not like and often will not work on side by side translation systems as shown above.
That is how programmers imagine translators will work and it is flawed. Translators work with a toolkit called TMX, Translation Memory Exchange (generic name see Okapi an open source implementation to get a feel for it), and in this they build up translation dictionaries for words, phrases and sentences. They the take a file of varying formats and feed it into the TMX software, this gives them a first pass that is 60%, 70% etc translated but like Google language API horribly mangled in terms of making sense in the target language.
Then what they do is translate the words not dealt with by TMX, adding to the dictionaries where logical, and they colloquialise it, i.e. make it work in the target language and make sense of it. For this reason the translator should always be translating into their native language.
They do it this way for a number of reasons, a) it makes sense and works and reduces their work load and b) because they get paid by the word and to do side by side translation does not allow them to use their tools and maximise their income.
What translators want is a file in a format that you can export, they can import and translate, export and send back to you to import.
The files formats can be csv, rtf, tmx, xliff, gettext and if you read the Symfony framework docs you can see how they do it and handle it (they do a pretty good job in my opinion).
Having said all that i was in a similar position about 8 years ago when having to write a site in English, French, German, Hungarian and Slovakian and i did the same as SimplPO and simply wrote my own side by side application to allow this to be done. However the company we were writing the application for did all their own translation in house so we didn't hit the problem with translators. When we did we wrote an export to RTF and import from RTF (that in itself is mind boggling) so the translators could function as above.
However SimplePO is the only other implementation of the idea i have seen. The frameworks such as Zend seem to think you just create lookup tags to replace words and phrases and build no control into the application to manage the process. Consequently it soon gets out of hand and the maintenance of it becomes both difficult and expensive.
Most people who write multilingual web sites actually don't. They write a master site and then make a copy, translate it and maintain the translated version. It seems clunky to us logical types but is actually very effective.
One of the reasons it is effective is the i18n and l10n are about many other things than language.
Look and feel. Anglo saxons like cool colours and san serif typefaces, Hispanic peoples like Serif type faces and brighter colours. And as you cross other cultures the expectations vary wildly in layout, types, colours etc.
French and to some degree German is 30% longer, more verbose, than the equivalent English so you layout goes to hell in a hand basket real quick.
Semitic language run right to left
Japanese and other language that are not alphabet based can run ltr rtl top to bottom and some do not even have white space
dates? US, Japanese, UK, Hungarian as all different
currency and number formats, don't even start me off
Well sorry to go on and to summarise:- For simple side to side just write it yourself, took me about two weeks without any frameworks and working it out as i went along just use tag replacement. But any more and consider what you are doing. Carefully.
If you can use gettext files (Zend_Translate supports them) you can give POEdit a try. It is quite simple to use and supports plural forms since version 1.3.
However, users will have to download the files and reupload them in the end, because POEdit is not an online tool. I don't know any other web based tool.
You can try Transtable, a simple web intefece for editing translations in php arrays.
Related
I'm writing a webapp in german, so all buttons,text,tooltips etc. are in german for now. But I want to use some kind of template file for the webapp so I can quick change to another language if needed. I thought about textfile that I explode with "\n" and load into a sessionvariable to have always all text the user will need in his session. An other approach would be to parse such a file i.e. a XML document like this:
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<phrase>
<placeholder></placeholder>
<value></value>
</phrase>
where every field has it's own name/value that represents a textsnippet or button or whatever on the website, and then cast it into an object an cache it for everyone. I think the second approach is the best for working with multiple languages for a webapp. Anybody perhaps some pointers what I could do even better, or just post how you did this kind of languagetemplating for mutlinational webpages/webapps in the past.
Since you are looking for a translation solution, I understand you don't use a framework to develop your site, since most of them provide you with solutions to handle translations.
Most frameworks and apps I've seen in php use arrays, where the original sentence is the key and the translation is the value. So, to make easier to translate it to several languages, the key is in english.
In case you use gettext as suggested, or another aproach, it'll be useful also to parse your code to catch all strings to be translated automatically, since it can be a mess doing it manually when the base code grows and you want to keep up to date your translations.
Take a look at GNU Gettext, its very handy for multilanguage support.
The main idea is that you just wrap your words or phrases into a function, like
echo _g('Hello');
so you do not have any engine changes. You will have to add translation files for each language you are using.
You've come up with 2 solutions for storing the data, but I suggest you need to think further about the architecture and take a more complete view of the lifecycle of each request.
Regarding architecture: neither solution scales up to describe an extensive vocabulary very well - although for one or 2 pages it will suffice. The alternative approach, to manage a translation database (such as gettext) which might be overkill - and performs less optimally with small numbers of pages but importantly performance does not deteriorate significantly with large/multiple dictionaries. A compromise solution might be to have a dataset for each URL/language (which might be extracted from a consolidated database).
If it were me, I would not use either method you proposed for storing the data: parsing XML creates a sginficant overhead for each page request : using \n as a delimiter precludes the use of \n within a translation. Using a serialized PHP array seems to be the least expensive solution.
I need to translate several PHP files (HTML Code + PHP Tags) into another language.
Google Translator's Kit allows this, but clears the PHP Tags, erases class="" attributes (?!) and adds html, head tags & what not. Completely useless.
How can I (ideally in batch) translate these files using any kind of automated translation service?
Thanks.
bmargulies is the most clear-cut way of doing it. However, it takes times.
If you're in a pinch, or want to cut corners, a relatively simple way to do it is to use regular expressions to filter your code out yourself. Match over multiple lines (/s flag in preg), store the match, and replace with a hash. Any hash. Just make sure it doesn't map to anything in any language.
Do the same for HTML tags if they are proving to be annoying to Google.
Translate with Google.
Replace back the hashes. Voila! Job done! If you're feeling even more daring, instead of replacing the hashes back, replace them with an l18n-suitable structure might prove to be even more worthwhile.
You need to internationalize the code. You need to move all the translatable strings out into a separate file, so that you can shove that through Google and then easily drop in the results.
Researching the topic of PHP I18N will prove rewarding.
Google Translator toolkit is for documents - not so much for source code. You can organize your program's strings as documents and translate them in Google Translator toolkit, and there are, in fact, software projects that do it, but it's contrived. It would be much better to use a different method, as the other people here say.
Put the translatable strings in separate files - you can use something like YAML or JSON, for example, or to just organize your strings as PHP arrays (that's how it's done in MediaWiki, for example). Each message should have a key. Use one file per language or one file with all the languages, and the strings grouped by languages. (By the way, use ISO 639-3 language codes - don't make up your own. Then you'll be able to reuse them in HTML lang attributes.)
After you organized your strings like that, write functions that load the strings from these files by message key and language code, and use these functions to display the messages - never use hardcoded strings.
Finally, put your files up for translation using software such as Pootle, Transifex, Zanata, or the MediaWiki Translate extension.
(Disclaimer: I am a developer of the MediaWiki Translate extension.)
Using something like Gettext (namely php-gettext) is IMHO best approach to do that. Another widely used option is to simply extract strings to separate files (be it PHP or JSON) and translate these. However I'd recommend to use Gettext as you will be using standard format with wide range of available tools.
I have an existing, database driven PHP application with around 40 pages printing an unknown (but rather large) number of English strings. The strings are currently all hard coded. There is also a set of static documentation pages. I now need to add language support to this application.
As far as I can tell gettext seems to be the standard solution to this problem, but gettext feels very much like a "hack" to me. I am also not certain about the additional overhead (both in development and run-time) it will cause. Are there any other solutions or frameworks that could be better suited to my requirements? Any best practices or pitfalls I should be aware of when starting this project?
gettext is the "standard" for multi-lingual text storage, but in the end, it is just a storage engine. It does nothing to put the proper text into your page. You need to abstract the text from your View so the proper text can be inserted.
In the end, you need a way to place the language text in your document. This means "tagging" the text in a certain way so that it can be searched and replaced by with desired language text. For the e-commerce site I manage (3 languages) I used a technique derived from Facebook FBML tagging system.
You can wrap your text in "tags" <trans id="slt">something like this</trans>. Then use the DOM tools in PHP to extract the ID, look up the translated text based on the id, replace the content between the tags with the proper language text. You can still use gettext for your storage mechanism, or your database. Your browser will ignore the tags, so your page will still look fine during development.
This is just one tagging example. You can use any tagging mechanism and use grep instead to extract, search and replace.
For static pages, you can pre-generate the translated versions and load the appropriate language version. This way there is no extra overhead for different languages.
I'm looking to i18n-ize a web app. The site will be constantly changing: text will be rewritten, new stuff added etc. The web app is written in PHP, but the same applies to any language.
Basically I want:
1) The code to be readable and maintainable
2) Translators to be sent an email when new stuff is added in English OR the English is changed
3) To know whether something is up-to-date or not.
4) Translators be able to update things online
I guess the best idea is to store everything in a database and handle things that way rtaher than PO files and gettext. But what's the best way:
$lang('contactus') has the disadvantage of being unreadable (code-wise), and slower to develop (as all English needs to be given a unique key and stored in the database)
$lang('Please contact us for more information') is readable and quicker, but if the English changes (typo, grammar edit, updated) then the translation disappears entirely.
How do other apps/frameworks handle it?
Avoid storing strings that need to be translated in the database. Did that myself and regretted it. Use external files that you can send to translators. Use strings in your preferred language as the keys. So as for your example $lang('Please contact us for more information') is the way to go. A text change in the English probably means a corresponding change in the translations so yeah it's a maintenance headache.
Plus there's more to it than just string translations. There are currency symbols and formats, number formats (decimal, digit grouping symbols, where the symbol appears), date formatting. Name formatting - in some locales people often have middle names in others they usually don't. Text reading left to right vs right to left as well. ugh.
For a web app it's sometimes just much simpler to have the web pages separated into language-locale directories and deal with it that way. You do have all you business logic separate from the view code right? This is where embedding business logic directly within html ala the typical PHP approach really starts to hurt.
Make some translation function with an easy to type name, for example t($key) or use existing solution (for example Zend_Translate) or PHP gettext, that provides the _($key) function.
The format of your translation files should not matter so much - whatever fits your translation process best.
Use your original language, for example English, for the key. For longer strings it makes sometimes sense to invent artificial keys, for example "introduction_text_1"
Never use constants or any shortened translation keys, don't use the database, avoid using just arrays. The only professional way to handle translations is a gettext(-like) function.
You should only use _("Original english text queries"). This has the advantage that at least the default language text is still available, should translation data/files be inaccessible.
Don't worry about changes in the text strings. In reality this is rare. If you use the gettext syntax, there are even tools to adapt the language files automatically then. Not many good tools, mind you. But more than for homebrew translation methods, and it gets the job done. If your PHP interpreter doesn't support native gettext, search for the "php-gettext" emulation or "upgradephp".
I am working on a large multilingual website and I am considering different approaches for making it multilingual. The possible alternatives I can think of are:
The Gettext functions with generation of .po files
One MySQL table with the translations and a unique string ID for each text
PHP-files with arrays containing the different translations with unique string IDs
As far as I have understood the Gettext functions should be most efficient, but my requirement is that it should be possible to change a text string in the original reference language (English) without the other translations of that string automatically reverting back to English just because a couple of words changed. Is this possible with Gettext?
What is the least resource demanding solution?
Is using the Gettext functions or PHP files with arrays more or less equally resource demanding?
Any other suggestions for more efficient solutions?
A few considerations:
1. Translations
Who will be doing the translations? People that are also connected to the site? A translation agency? When using Gettext you'll be working with 'pot' (.po) files. These files contain the message ID and the message string (the translation). Example:
msgid "A string to be translated would go here"
msgstr ""
Now, this looks just fine and understandable for anyone who needs to translate this. But what happens when you use keywords, like Mike suggests, instead of full sentences? If someone needs to translate a msgid called "address_home", he or she has no clue if this is should be a header "Home address" or that it's a full sentence. In this case, make sure to add comments to the file right before you call on the gettext function, like so:
/// This is a comment that will be included in the pot file for the translators
gettext("ready_for_lost_episode");
Using xgettext --add-comments=/// when creating the .po files will add these comments. However, I don't think Gettext is ment to be used this way. Also, if you need to add comments with every text you want to display you'll a) probably make an error at some point, b) you're whole script will be filled with the texts anyway, only in comment form, c) the comments needs to be placed directly above the Gettext function, which isn't always convient, depending on the position of the function in your code.
2. Maintenance
Once your site grows (even further) and your language files along with it, it might get pretty hard to maintain all the different translations this way. Every time you add a text, you need to create new files, send out the files to translators, receive the files back, make sure the structure is still intact (eager translators are always happy to translate the syntax as well, making the whole file unusable :)), and finish with importing the new translations. It's doable, sure, but be aware with possible problems on this end with large sites and many different languages.
Another option: combine your 2nd and 3rd alternative:
Personally, I find it more useful to manage the translation using a (simple) CMS, keeping the variables and translations in a database and export the relevent texts to language files yourself:
add variables to the database (e.g.: id, page, variable);
add translations to these variables (e.g.: id, varId, language, translation);
select relevant variables and translations, write them to a file;
include the relevant language file in your site;
create your own function to display a variables text:
text('var'); or maybe something like __('faq','register','lost_password_text');
Point 3 can be as simple as selecting all the relevant variables and translations from the database, putting them in an array and writing the serlialized array to a file.
Advantages:
Maintenance. Maintaining the texts can be a lot easier for big projects. You can group variables by page, sections or other parts within your site, by simply adding a column to your database that defines to which part of the site this variable belongs. That way you can quickly pull up a list of all the variables used in e.g. the FAQ page.
Translating. You can display the variable with all the translations of all the different languages on a single page. This might be useful for people who can translate texts into multiple languages at the same time. And it might be useful to see other translations to get a feel for the context so that the translation is as good as possible. You can also query the database to find out what has been translated and what hasn't. Maybe add timestamps to keep track of possible outdated translations.
Access. This depends on who will be translating. You can wrap the CMS with a simple login to grant access to people from a translation agency if need be, and only allow them to change certain languages or even certain parts of the site. If this isn't an option you can still output the data to a file that can be manually translated and import it later (although this might come with the same problems as mentioned before.). You can add one of the translations that's already there (English or another main language) as context for the translator.
All in all I think you'll find that you'll have a lot more control over the translations this way, especially in the long run. I can't tell you anything about speed or efficiency of this approach compared to the native gettext function. But, depending on the size of the language files, I don't think it'll be a big difference. If you group the variables by page or section, you can alway include only the required parts.
After some testing I finally decided to go more or less with the lines of Alecs' combination of the second and third alternative.
Gettext problem
I tried to set up the whole gettext-system first to try it out, but it turned out to be much more complicated then I thought. The problem is that Windows and Unix systems use different language shortnames for setlocale(). For the moment I'm running my dev-server on Windows with Wamp, while the final site will run on Linux. After I went through a couple of dozen guides, forums, questions etc. and restarting the server after each modification. I couldn't get it setup properly in any easy way it seemed. Additionally gettext is not threadsafe, to update the language file the server needs to be restarted or a hack needs to be used, there is no easy way of handling different versions of language files or handling the original English text without modifying the source or using Mikes suggestion, which as Alec pointed out isn't optimal.
Solution
So I ended up with what I think is the best solution based on Alecs response:
Save all the translations in a DB with the fields; language, page, var_key, version, revision and last_modified_time - where the version is corresponds to versions of the original translation (English), while revision allows the translator to modify/correct the finalized translations within a version.
Use a kind of CMS for translation, which is connected to the DB and handles different versions and allows for an easy overview of which languages are translated, in which version and how complete the translations are.
When a revision of a version is finalized a cache files are generated - each file contains an array with only the var_key and text-translation for one language and one page and are named with the ISO 639-1 names of the languages and the page name like: lang/en_index.php These language files are then simply included and wrapped in a function t($var_key) which allows for using the DB during the development, while then changed to only use the cache files.
Performance
I never got around to test gettext, but according to the link Mike posted the difference in performance between using an array and gettext is totally acceptable for me for the benefits which a custom system gives as described above. However, I compared using an array with 20 translated text-strings in an array compared to retrieving the same 20 text-strings from a MySQL DB. It turned out that using an array included from a file was aeound 6 times faster than retrieving all the 20 strings at the same time from the MySQL DB. It was no really scientific benchmark and the results may surely vary on different systems and setups, but it clearly shows exactly what I expected - that it would be much slower using a DB than using an array directly, which is why I choose to generate cache-files for the array instead of using the DB.
As a comparison I also tested how fast it was to only output simple echos with the same text. It turned out to be around 20 times faster than using arrays from an included file, but well - then it is not possible to translate without having different versions of the page for different languages, which defies the purpose of dynamic pages. Then it is better to also use a good cachesystem.
Performance test source files:
PHP: http://pastie.org/964082
MySQL table: http://pastie.org/964115
It is surely not perfect, but at least creates an idea about the performance differences.
Rather than having to use the English text as the keys you could arbitrarily do this but also provide english translations i.e.
gettext key is 'hello'
You then have your various language translations of this and an english translation of this that is also 'hello', then if you want to update the english version of the string you can leave the key alone and just update the english translation.