So far, smart city systems are being set up to appropriate and commercialize individual and community data. So far, communities are not waking up to the realization that a capacity they need is being stolen from them before they have it.”

Localisation ≠ Translation To start with, we have been researching, publishing, and producing articles on the topics of localisation to gain a wider understanding for implementing it. Here's some of what we published with @sophie authoring:

You code, we translate.

Then there’s markup inside each paragraph, like links and such. You could do it right in the translation strings, but your translator then needs to know how to handle the markup, and you risk duplicating knowledge if you go as far as to hard-code link URLs. What I do is split up the translations, but keep them under the same key: en.yml1 2 3 4 log_in_or_sign_up: text: "%{log_in} or %{sign_up} to do stuff." log_in: "Log in" sign_up: "Sign up" header.erb1 2 3 4 5 <%= t( :'log_in_or_sign_up.text', log_in: link_to(t(:'log_in_or_sign_up.log_in'), login_path), sign_up: link_to(t(:'log_in_or_sign_up.sign_up'), signup_path) ) %> This way, the translator sees no code or markup (except for the i18n interpolation syntax) and there is no duplication.

If you ever need to work with external translators, it’s a bit of a pain sending both your YML files and a bunch of views like index.en.html.erb. For one thing, you need some code to find all those files and send them, and put them back after receiving the translations. For another, your translator must respect the markup and code of the template, and know not to translate them. And if you want to use tools like WebTranslateIt, it’s easier to stick to YML.

Action View has the ability to render different templates depending on the current locale.For example, suppose you have an ArticlesController with a show action. By default, calling this action will render app/views/articles/show.html.erb. But if you set I18n.locale = :de, then app/views/articles/show.de.html.erb will be rendered instead. If the localized template isn't present, the undecorated version will be used. This means you're not required to provide localized views for all cases, but they will be preferred and used if available.

ActionController and ActionMailer default include AbstractController::Rendering directly or indirectly (ActionController::Metal::Rendering). AbstractController::Rendering uses ActionView as default library for its template rendering engine and includes AbstractController::ViewPaths and an instance of I18n proxy to find localized views. To learn more i'd like to refer to the ActionPack source code on github. To get to the point. ActionView allows you to use localisation in your templates: See Rails guide: Action View Overview , Chapter Localized views.

However imagine we are creating a format string in a separate file, commonly because we would like to internationalize it and we rewrite it as: <?php$format = 'The %s contains %d monkeys';echo sprintf($format, $num, $location);?> We now have a problem. The order of the placeholders in the format string does not match the order of the arguments in the code. We would like to leave the code as is and simply indicate in the format string which arguments the placeholders refer to. We would write the format string like this instead: <?php$format = 'The %2$s contains %1$d monkeys';echo sprintf($format, $num, $location);?> An added benefit is that placeholders can be repeated without adding more arguments in the code.

If you have more than one placeholder in a string, it is recommended that you use argument swapping. In this case, single quotes (') are mandatory : double quotes (") will tell php to interpret the $s as the s variable, which is not what we want.

Sometimes a single term is used in several contexts. Although it is one and the same word in English, it may need to be translated differently in some languages. For example, the word "Post" can be used both as a verb ("Click here to post your comment") and as a noun ("Edit this post"). In such cases, the _x() function should be used. It is similar to __(), but it has an additional second argument -- the context:

Poedit and other tools can scan your .php files for references of __(), _e(), _n() and so on, and grab those strings for translation, which is awesome, because otherwise you’d have to manually add every single string. Now, when these tools come across _n() in our sources, they know it’s a plural thing, because of a special keyword setting which looks something like _n:1,2, meaning _n() takes at least two arguments, where the first argument is the singular, and the second argument is a the plural, so it grabs both strings. Let’s take a look at how Poedit and other tools will parse our function above: Hello there _n() on line 3! I’m supposed to grab two of your arguments because I have this smart keyword setting, but none of these arguments are strings, so I’ll just skip to the next match

Quite a few times, there will be collisions with similar translatable text found in more than two places, but with different translated context. By including the context in the pot file, translators can translate the two strings differently.

WordPress uses gettext libraries to be able to add the translations in PHP. In WordPress you should use the WordPress localization functions instead of the native PHP gettext-compliant translation functions.

This is where the incredibly useful gettext filter comes in. If you take a peek at your plugin's code you'll see strings like this: .gist table { margin-bottom: 0; } <?php _e( 'Related Products', 'woocommerce' ); ?> view raw sample-translatable-string.php hosted with by GitHub You can easily translate these strings by adding a filter to your functions.php file: .gist table { margin-bottom: 0; } <?php /** * Change text strings * * @link http://codex.wordpress.org/Plugin_API/Filter_Reference/gettext */ function my_text_strings( $translated_text, $text, $domain ) { switch ( $translated_text ) { case 'Related Products' : $translated_text = __( 'Check out these related products', 'woocommerce' ); break; } return $translated_text; } add_filter( 'gettext', 'my_text_strings', 20, 3 );

Poedit’s built in support for Crowdin, a great localisation management platform, makes collaboration a breeze. Access to all your projects and translate directly from the app.

For this simple example, you can simply edit the .po file in your editor and add the translation to all the msgstr sets. For a larger, more complex set of translation, the GlotPress and Poedit tools exist to help.