[Taler] i18n

[Florian Dold]

Hi!

Gabor pointed me to some resources for JavaScript internationalization
(i18n), I'll summarize how the situation looks to me here.

In general, there are two distinct flavors of i18 approaches:

1. resource-based:  Most of today's larger (web) applications seem to
use this.  The programmer never writes string constants directly, but
always refers to a resource, like:

showDialog(getTranslation(MessageResources.Welcome, args))

This is more tedious for the programmer, but allows to use the
MessageFormat [1] translation standard, which allows all kinds of fancy
things (complex queries, support for gender, ...).

Enterprise-y frameworks like AngularJS follow this style as well [2].


2. gettext-style:  Programmers just write all strings that should be
translated in their favorite language and mark then, usually via this
underscore macro.  Some helper program then extracts the translatable
string.

JavaScript has enough libraries to *read* .po/.mo files, but barely any
support for extracting these strings from source.

However, it would be trivial(ish) to just use an off-the-shelf JS parser
(esprima [3] is very good for that) to extract marked strings,
preferably tagged template literals like:

i18n`This is a translated message.  Hello ${user}.`

Alternatively, we'd just have to hack together our own message catalogue
for gettext by grepping the source code in the beginning.


Does anybody have more experience with i18n in JavaScript projects?

Do we want to do gettext or resource-based translations?

Personally as a developer I'd prefer gettext-style, but in the end I
wouldn't mind either too much.

- Florian


[1] http://userguide.icu-project.org/formatparse/messages
[2] https://docs.angularjs.org/guide/i18n
[3] http://esprima.org/
[4] https://github.com/gmarty/xgettext

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