README.md

i18n

A Clojure library and leiningen plugin to make i18n easier. Provides convenience functions to access the JVM's localization facilities and automates managing messages and resource bundles. The tooling for translators uses GNU gettext, so that translators can work with .po files which are widely used and for which a huge amount of tooling exists.

The main.clj and example/program in this repo contain some simple code that demonstrates how to use the translation functions. Before you can use it, you need to run make to generate the necessary ResourceBundles. After that, you can use lein run or LANG=de_DE lein run to look at English and German output.

Developer usage

Any Clojure code that needs to generate human-readable text must use the functions puppetlabs.i18n.core/trs and puppetlabs.i18n.core/tru to do so. Use trs for messages that should be formatted in the system's locale, for example log messages, and tru for messages that will be shown to the current user, for example an error that happened processing a web request.

When you require puppetlabs.i18n.core into your namespace, you must call it either trs/tru or i18n/trs/i18n/tru (these are the names that xgettext will look for when it extracts strings) Typically, you would have this in your namespace declaration

(ns puppetlabs.myproject
  (:require [puppetlabs.i18n.core :as i18n :refer [trs tru]]))

You use trs/tru very similar to how you use format, except that the format string must be a valid java.text.MessageFormat pattern. For example, you would write

(println (trs "It takes {0} women {1} months to have a child" 3 9))

Comments for translators

It is sometimes useful to tell the translator something about the message; you can do that by preceding the message string in thetrs/tru invocation with a comment; in the above example you might want to say

;; This is really just a silly example message. It gets the following
;; arguments:
;; 0 : number of women (an integer)
;; 1 : number of months (also an integer)
(println (trs "It takes {0} women {1} months to have a child" 3 9))

The comment will be copied to messages.pot together with the actual message so that translators have some context on what they are working on. Note that such comments must be immediately preceding the string that is the message. When you write

;; No translator will see this
(trs
  "A message on another line")

the comments do not get extracted into messages.pot.

Single quotes in messages

Single quotes have a special meaning in java.text.MessageFormat patterns and need to be escaped with another single quote:

;; Will produce "Hes going to the store"
(trs "He's going to the store")

;; You may want to supply a comment for devs and
;; translators to make sure the quoting is preserved.
;; The following will produce "He's going to the store"
;; (trs "He''s going to the store")

Development tools

Extracting messages and building ResourceBundles requires the command line tools from GNU gettext which you will have to install manually.

If you are using brew on OSX, run brew install gettext. Occasionally gettext will not be symlinked. This can be remedied by running brew link --force

On Red Hat-based operating systems, including Fedora, install gettext via yum install gettext

Project setup

1. In your project.clj, add puppetlabs/i18n to the :dependencies and to the plugins
2. Run lein i18n init. This will
   • put a Makefile.i18n into dev-resources/ in your project and include it into an existing toplevel Makefile resp. create a new one that does that. You should check these files into you source control system.
   • add hooks to the compile task that will refresh i18n data (equivalent of running make i18n)

This setup will ensure that the file locales/messages.pot and the translations in locales/LANG.po are updated every time you compile your project. Compiling your project will also regenerate the Java ResourceBundle classes that your code needs to do translations.

You can manually regenerate these files by running make i18n. Additional information about the Make targets is available through running make help.

The i18n tools maintain files in two directories: message catalogs in locales/ and compiled translations in resources/. You should check the files in locales/ into source control, but not the ones in resources/.

Web service changes

If you are working on an HTTP service, you will also need to make sure that we properly handle the locale that the user requests via the Accept-Language header. The library contains the function locale-negotiator that you should use as a Ring middleware. It stores the negotiated locale in the *locale* binding - ultimately, that's the locale that the tru macro will use.

Testing and pseudo-localization

For testing, it is often useful to introduce translations that are maintained separately from the generally used locales, and whose change is controlled by developers rather than translators. The i18n library uses the file resources/locales.clj, which is generated and maintained by the make targets, to track for which locales translations are available. Additional locales can be made available by putting one or more locales.clj files on the class path whose :package entry is the same as the one in resources/locales.clj but that mentions additional :locales.

That makes it possible to introduce additional locales for testing by doing the following:

1. Create a file test/locales.clj by copying resources/locales.clj and edit the copy by changing the :locales entry to the languages that should be used for testing
2. For each of the additional locales, create a message catalog. It will generally be easiest to base that message catalog on properties files rather than on .po files. If you added the eo locale, you need to create a file test/<package path>/Messages_eo.properties
3. Use those additional locales in your tests. The test/ directory of this library has an example of that in the test-tru test in core_test.clj.

The macro with-user-locale can be used to change the locale under which a certain test should run, for example, with

(let [eo (string-as-locale "eo")]
  (with-user-locale eo
    (testing "user-locale is Esperanto"
      (is (= eo (user-locale))))))

Translator usage

When a translator gets ready to translate messages, they need to update the corresponding .po file. For example, to update German translations, they'd run

make locales/de.po

and then edit locales/de.po. The plugin actually performs the make invocation above every time you compile the project, so you should only have to do it manually to add a PO file for a new locale. Translators should be able to work off the PO files that are checked into source control, as they are always kept 'fresh' by the plugin.

Release usage

When it comes time to make a release, or if you want to use your code in a different locale before then, you need to generate Java ResourceBundle classes that contain the localized messages. This is done by running make msgfmt on your project.

Hacking

The code is set up as an ordinary leiningen project, with the one exception that you need to run make before running lein test or lein run, as there are messages that need to be turned into a message bundle.

Maintaineance

Maintainers: David Lutterkort [email protected] and Libby Molina [email protected] Tickets: still need to determine the right place to file bugs