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intl me this, intl me that
Andrei Zmievski
Digg.com

IPC ~ May 26, 2009 ~ Berlin
Tuesday, May 26, 2009

Who is this guy?
Open Source Fellow @ Digg
PHP Core Developer since 1999
Architect of the Unicode/i18n support
Release Manager for PHP 6
Twitter: @a
Beer lover (and brewer)


Why localize?


One example.


Another reason.


Why Localize?

English speakers are now a minority on WWW
Nearly 3 out of 4 participants surveyed by Common
Sense Advisory agreed that they were more likely to
buy from sites in their own languages than in English
Global consumers will pay more for products with
information in their language


Most important thing...


No assumptions!


No assumptions!

English German is just another language
USA Germany is just another country
Earth is just another planet (eventually)


i18n

PHP 5.3 or PHP 6
intl extension
Consider all data processing and output points


Locale data

Common Locale Data Repository (CLDR)
374 locales: 137 languages and 140 territories
Updated regularly
Used by intl extension


Translation

Identifying what to translate
Checking all sources
Obtaining translation
Iteration


What to translate

Translatable units
Continue or There were 5 search results
Approaches
Automatic “rippers”
Manual markup


Sources: PHP

Anything destined for output layer
single- and double-quoted strings
heredocs
error/exception messages (if seen by messages)
404 pages, anyone?


Sources: PHP

Use output buffering to detect misses
Consider templates to enforce separation
Don’t use extensions that cannot deal with UTF-8


Sources: JS and CSS

Text
Images
Position or alignment of elements may change
Modularize locale-dependent code into separate ﬁles
<script src=/slideshow/intl-me-this-intl-me-that/1499351/quot;/js/common.jsquot; type=quot;text/javascriptquot;></script>
<script src=quot;/js/locale-<?php echo $LOCALE ?>.jsquot;
type=quot;text/javascriptquot;></script>


Sources: DB

Strings are ﬁne, if they will never be displayed to users
Consider using constants/identiﬁers,
e.g. not admin or user, but 1 or 2
For things like product titles, keep separate table with
translations and link against the main one


Sources: external

File-based content
RSS Feeds
Web services
et al


Obtaining translations
Fast

Cheap Accurate



You
(maybe) Fast and cheap - not accurate
quot;Not to perambulate the corridors during the hours of
repose in the boots of ascension.quot;
—sign in an Austrian ski hotel



Professionals
(usually) Accurate and fast - not cheap



Community
(fairly) Accurate and cheap - not fast


Facebook approach

Turn translation into a competitive activity
Build it into the interface (just another app)
Validation via voting


Iteration

Catching new units
mark up untranslated strings
use mnemonic identiﬁers,
e.g. MENU.NAV.HELP
Merge/update tools


Using translations

Self-contained pages (masochistic)
standalone per-locale pages with no common root
“quick-n-dirty”
iteration? not so much


Using translations

Runtime
uses translation storage and on-the-ﬂy lookup
usually combined with caching


Using translations

Pre-generation (“baking”)
complete per-locale sites generated ofﬂine
no runtime lookups
may require runtime operations (sorting, etc)
could increase opcode cache memory requirements


Considerations

Fidelity
Ease of use
Performance
Flexibility
Portability


Fidelity

UTF-8
don’t use tools that don’t support it


Fidelity
How big should translatable units be?
“As large as possible, but not larger”
Avoid concatenation problem

There are <?php echo $nMesg ?> unread messages
in <?php echo $nFolders ?> folders.


Fidelity

Sometimes the largest possible unit is a word
Context is important
chinese (person) vs. chinese (language)
Add context as part of the unit
chinese-person or CHINESE.PERSON


Fidelity
Combining translations with runtime data
(parametrization)

There are %1 unread messages in %2 folders.

sprintf() - works for simple things
gettext() - can help with plurals
MessageFormat + ChoiceFormat is better


Ease of use

Intuitive tools (or good documentation)
Transparent formats
Translation memory
useful for short, precise matches, not fuzzy
use in testing and ﬁrst pass, not in production


Performance

Caching
translation units
translated pages
APC, memcache, etc
Reduce runtime overhead


Flexibility

Adding new languages/locales quickly
Translation inheritance


Portability

Moving between tools
Translations, most importantly
XLIFF
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xliff


Tools: gettext
Developed for C/C++ originally
Somewhat obscure format
Translations on disk
Have to compile translations with every change
Proper markup not always possible
POedit is a decent translation editor


Tools: ezTranslation (et al)

More of a translation look-up tool
Can support various backends for translation storage
and caching (QT Linguist format by default)
Supports parametrized strings
Bork/l33t ﬁlters for marking untranslated strings


Tools: template engines

Smarty (for example)
3rd party solutions based on pre- and post-filters
Translations in config files or gettext mainly, could be in
DB
Mark-up approaches vary
Parametrized strings are possible (depends on plugin)


Tools: r3

Developed and supported
by Yahoo!
Very ﬂexible and powerful,
but a bit of a learning curve
Translations are a subset of
“site variations”


Tools: r3

Inheritance everywhere
Translations in DB
(MySQL or SQLite)
Has basic GUI for
some operations


Tools: intl
Available for PHP 5.3 and PHP 6
Access to locale data
Formatters/parsers
Number, date, time, message, choice, etc
Collation (sorting)
More coming


r3: setup
% sudo sudo pear install -f stickleback-[version].tgz
% sudo pear install -f --alldeps r3-[version].tgz

% mkdir ~/r3
% r3 setup setuphome ~/r3
% export R3HOME=~/r3

% r3 setup installdb


r3: setup

% r3 dim product create wine
% r3 dim intl create generic_intl
% r3 dim intl create -p generic_intl us
% r3 dim intl create -p generic_intl fr
% r3 dim intl create -p us ca

% r3 dim intl parent ca set fr -d translation
% r3 dimension intl parent fr unset -f -d translation
...


r3: inheritance
templates translations
generic_intl generic_intl
fr us
us fr
ca ca


r3: make a page

% r3 target create wine/generic_intl/index.php
% r3 template edit wine/generic_intl/index.php
index.php.ros
...
% r3 generate -av


r3: markup

<r3:trans>The Wine Source</r3:trans>

% r3 translation list
% r3 translation set wine/fr ‘The Wine Source’
‘La Source de Vin’
% r3 generate wine/fr


r3: translation
% r3 translation save all fr.xml
...
% r3 translation merge fr.xml

<file original='wine/fr/generic'
source-language='en'
target-language='fr'
datatype='plaintext'>
<body>
<trans-unit id='26'>
approved='yes'>
<source>The Wine Source</source>
<target>La Source de Vin</target>
</trans-unit>
...


r3: compile-time PHP
test.html.ros test.html
<div> <div>
<r3:cphp> 1
foreach (range(1, 5) as $i) 2
{ 3
echo ‘$i,’<br/>’; 4
} 5
</r3:cphp> </div>
</div>


r3: parameterized strings
test.php.ros
$message = quot;<r3:trans>You have {0,number} messages as
of {1,date,full}.</r3:trans>quot;;
$args = array(1234, time());
echo MessageFormatter::formatMessage(
$LOCALE, $message, $args
);

fr translation
Au {1,date,full} vous avez {0,number} messages.

fr output
Au mardi 22 juillet 2008 vous avez 1 234 messages.


r3: runtime processing
$map = array('jp' => 'ja',
fr' => 'fr',
'us' => 'en_US',
'ca' => 'fr_CA',
'ru' => 'ru_RU',
'de' => 'de_DE',
'generic_intl' => 'en_US');
$ar = array($context->trans('Ivory Coast'),
$context->trans('Russia'),
$context->trans('USA'));
$lang = $context->location()->get_lang_attribute();
$LOCALE = $map[$lang];
$coll = new Collator($map[$lang]);
$coll->sort($ar);
foreach ($ar as $c) {
print quot;<li>$c</li>quot;;
}


Resources
r3
http://developer.yahoo.com/r3/

gettext
http://zez.org/article/articleview/42/
http://www.poedit.net/

Smarty
Chapter 12 of Smarty book
http://smarty.incutio.com/?page=SmartyMultiLanguageSupport
http://bit.ly/2q2XM1

ezTranslation
http://ezcomponents.org/docs/tutorials/Translation

intl
http://php.net/intl


thank you спасибо
http://gravitonic.com/talks


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