google-translate-xlf

A command-line utility to automatically translate .xlf translation files using Google Translate

Installation

This is a command-line utility. To install this utility, run:

npm install -g google-translate-xlf

This will install the utility globally so that it can be run from any location. The executable installed by this module is translate-xlf.

Usage

Before you begin, you will need an .xlf file to translate! If you are using Angular 2+ and the Angular CLI, you will probably extract an .xlf file from your app by running ng xi18n inside your Angular project. This produces a file named messages.xlf inside your project folder.

Say we have an .xlf file named messages.xlf. Let's translate this file from English ("en") to Hindi ("hi") and save the translated file as messages.hi.xlf:

translate-xlf --in messages.xlf --out messages.hi.xlf --from en --to hi

Or, if you don't like typing, you can use the abbreviated versions of the arguments:

translate-xlf -i messages.xlf -o messages.hi.xlf -f en -t hi

For more usage help, run:

translate-xlf help

By default, a comment is prepended to the output file that looks like this:

<!-- Translated on May 15th 2018, 5:01:18 pm by google-translate-xlf: https://github.com/nfriend/google-translate-xlf -->

This behavior can be turned off by passing --comment false.

Caveats

This utility will not attempt to translate complex <source> values, like this:

<source>{VAR_SELECT, select, male {male} female {female} other {other} }</source>

In this case, the utility will simply copy this element and rename it to <target>.

If this utility encounters something like this:

<source>The author is <x id="ICU" equiv-text="{gender, select, male {...} female {...} other {...}}"/></source>

only "The author is" will be translated.

It hopefully goes without saying that the translations produced by this utility will be far from perfect. The intention of this utility is to provide a very rough translation for development purposes.

Developing

The easiest way to develop on this module is to use test-driven development. Unit tests can be run with npm test. To automatically re-run the tests when you make changes to the files, run npm run test:watch.

Translation

This utility uses Google Translate's online API for its translations using this NPM package: https://www.npmjs.com/package/google-translate-api.