Internationalisation of BXE User Interface

Hi

(I'm CC'ing [email protected], as they might be interested in that as well)

I had a request (or more in the last months) for making BXE 
multi-langual. There's nothing, which stands against doing it, except my 
precious time ;)

But here are my thoughts:

We use XML documents for defining the "strings". As we use the cocoon 
i18n format already in our CMS, it makes a lot of sense to us, to use 
that XML format. Here's an example (and more info about cocoon's i18n 
implementation):

http://cocoon.apache.org/2.1/userdocs/transformers/i18n-transformer.html#Catalogues+%28Dictionaries%29

What we have to do now, is to provide a class to BXE, which does the 
translation. The best thing would be to do that BXE independent, so one 
can use that JS class for other things than only in BXE.

Here's a prototype (it's full of coding mistakes, but you should get the 
idea):

***
function i18n (catalogLocation, locale) {
	
	this.catalog = document.load(catalogLocation + "_" + locale + ".xml");

}

i18n.prototype.getText = function (key) {

  	result = this.catalog.query('/catalogue/message[@key = "'.key.'"]');
         if(result && result->length > 0) {
             return result->item(0)->nodeValue;
         }
         return key;
}

***

And in the actual code, we will simply do then:

var i18nObj = new i18n("/xml/catalog","en");
text = i18nObj.getText("some text here");

(of course, we need some kind of singleton, so we don't load the xml 
document again and again, but you get the idea)

One problem with the whole i18n stuff is the order of words, eg. in 
English it's "Add Element" in German "Element hinzufügen" and Element is 
usually variable, therefore we need some variable substitution...

In cocoon, it's solved the following way:
the key would be "Add {0}" and you can provide further arguments. In 
this case, getText would take a second parameter (an array) for variable 
substitution..

text = i18nObj.getText("Add {0}", array("Elementname"));

and this would return "Add Elementname" in english, but "Elementname 
hinzufügen" in German. Does this make sense?

Additionally, we could also add a transformer, which translates whole 
XML documents with the i18n syntax of cocoon. Not sure, if we really 
need that in BXE right now, but that should be doable as well.

Any other ideas? Or should I go ahead with that approach?

chregu





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christian stocker | Bitflux GmbH | schoeneggstrasse 5 | ch-8004 zurich
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