i10n-language-builder

Command line utility for building internationalized JSON-based language files across multiple regions.

Installation

Install from NPM:

npm install i10n-language-builder

How It Works

Now that your application has hit it big, you'd like to translate it into multiple languages. JSON seems like a good format to use since it's easy to traverse in JavaScript and has good support for nesting and grouping related terms together using objects. Also, Format.js and i18next are pretty cool, as is the ICU Message Syntax.

Base Language Files

You'll start with your base language files. These should be named using the two character primary language subtag (ISO 639-1). For example: en.json (English), es.json (Spanish), fr.json (French).

Sample English (en.json):

{
	"Intro": "Welcome to harbor center",
	"Opening": "It's where ships seek shelter from stormy weather"
}

Any English speakers using your application from outside the United States will quickly point out that "center" is spelled "centre" and "harbor" is actually "harbour". To solve this, we need some regional overrides...

Regional Language Files

For each language, there might be zero or more regional overrides to handle region-specific changes. These files should be prefixed with the language subtag of the base language, followed by a hyphen, followed by a two character regional subtag. For example: en-CA.json (Canadian English), en-GB.json (United Kingdom English), en-AU.json (Australian English), and so on.

Sample Canadian English (en-CA.json):

{
	"Intro": "Welcome to harbour centre"
}

These region-specific files only need to override the terms that differ from the base language. They can also be empty.

Putting it all together

When you point i10n-language-builder at a directory containing your base and regional language files, it will produce a set of files that contains the union of each base file with each regional override file. This is most useful as a step in your application's build process.

Other features:

• If your translations for some languages aren't ready yet, you can provide a default language as a fallback
• If a region file exists (e.g. fr-CA.json) but there's no base file (e.g. fr.json), an error occurs
• If a region file overrides a term that does not exist in the base file, an error occurs
• If the data type in a region file differs from that in the base file, an error occurs

Usage from the command line

i10n-language-builder <path> <output> --fallback=fr

Where:

• path: directory containing base and region language files
• output: directory to place output files
• fallback: language to use when translations are missing

Programmatic usage

You can also use i10n-language-builder from your JavaScript application:

var langBuilder = require('i10n-language-builder');

var opts = {
	input: 'inputDir',
	output: 'outputDir',
	fallback: 'fr' // defaults to "en"
};
langBuilder(opts, function(err) {
	// callback when processing is complete
});

Contributing

Contributions are welcome, please submit a pull request!

Code Style

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