Gettext

Introduction

Gettext is a library for "translating" applications to multiple languages. Seaside-Gettext allows you to use gettext from Seaside applications.

Getting Started

In a recent image, DoIt:

1. (! ConfigurationOfSeaside3 project version: #stable ) load: #('Seaside-Gettext-Core' 'Seaside-Gettext- Examples').

Previously that was:

1. Load Gettext from http://www.squeaksource.com/PharoNonCorePackages
2. Load Seaside-Gettext-Core from http://www.squeaksource.com/Seaside30Addons
3. If you're on Pharo load Seaside-Pharo-Gettext-Core from http://www.squeaksource.com/Seaside30Addons. This is only needed to export the strings to translate.

API

The easiest way to translate a string is using the #translate: message on the render canvas.

html translate: 'text to translate'

This will use content negotiation to find the first language that's supported by both your system and the user. If you want the set the user language to a specific one send #locale: to the current session. If you want to translate to a specific language use

html translate: 'other text to translate' to: aWALocale

This doesn't work for attributes. In these cases you want to use #seasideTranslated on String

html image url: aWAUrl; altText: 'sunrise at the beach' seasideTranslated

or

html image url: aWAUrl; altText: ('sunrise at the beach' seasideTranslatedTo: aWALocale)

There are some cases when neither of these approaches work. Mainly when the method that contains the literal is executed outside of a Seaside request. In these cases you can use #seasideLazyTranslated

descriptionFirstName
	^ MAStringDescription new
		accessor: #firstName;
		label: 'First Name' seasideLazyTranslated;
		priority: 100;
		yourself

Workflow

1. write your application using the API above
2. register your domain. A domain is a way to group strings, you might
3. have Pier and a reporting application running in the same image and want each to use it's own dictionary: TextDomainManager registerCategoryPrefix: 'Seaside-Gettext-Examples' domain: 'gettext'
4. export the template WAGetTextExporter new exportTemplate
5. create the translation files e.g. using poedit
6. put the translation files in locale/<locale>/LC_MESSAGES/<domain>.(po|mo)
7. done

One of the nice things about gettext is that there are external tools like poedit to manage the translation files which you can give to your translators. No more need to mess around with Excel. There are also tools that display how much of your application is already translated.

Application Configuration

To use Seaside-Gettest in an application a WALocalizationContextFilter has to be present. An easy way to do this is override initializeFilters in your session class and add it there. See Seaside-Gettext-Examples for an example.