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.
Is there a specific reason your translations are in json files, and not using a system such as gettext? IMO those .po files are much easier to translate for non-tech people, especially with many third party apps available for editing them. There are libraries available for many languages, so you don’t have to do anything manually in most cases.
Stop reinventing the wheel.
Major translation systems like gettext (especially the GNU variant) have decades of tooling built up for “merging” and all sorts of other operations.
Even if you don’t want to use their binary format at runtime, their tooling is still worth it.
I have to spend time looking at all files, figuring out which keys i haven’t added there
It sounds like a simple bash script could do that for you. Take keys from the English language file, compare against other language files, find missing keys for each language.
You could write a script that updates other files based on english file. It could put someting like
"key": "UNTRANSLATED"to missing fields.
A trick the indie game development community has used for years is just a simple excel file. CSVs are the easiest to work with if you are unfamiliar. First column is the ID of the text that you can reference in code, and each column is a translation of that text. Get the initial translation in place, typically English, then email the excel file to anyone who ask to create as fan translation. Also, unless you are translating the Illiad, the extra memory use is negligible.
CSVs are the easiest to work with if you are unfamiliar
A disadvantage with this is, if you ever want to collaborate with someone else using version control, it will increase the amount of merge conflicts, because multiple strings will be on the same line.
True, but if there is a large project with many different collaborators, they’d need a more verbose system than a CSV file anyway. (And likely a more senior developer who knows how to handle situations like this.) My point is that excel files, and CSVs in particular, are easy to parse, easy to check for completeness, and easy to distribute to less technical people. Basically, while not optimal, they will just work.
