Dojo provides an internationalization framework originally developped by IBM and borrowed from Java:
http://dojotoolkit.org/reference-guide/1.8/dojo/i18n.html

from id.

I am not able to run the dojo example in chorme webbrowser under linux. It is for me not clear how much js code from dojo is needed to get a working i18n stack.

Perhabs we frist start with a wish list:

Wishlist for i18n

• open source, free license
• the framwork should support any language (utf8)
• should support singular, plural
• should support something like placeholdes: "Your way is %d nodes long"
• should be easy to translated by the crowed (translatewiki)
• loading languages on demand
• get default language from browser
• switch language without restart

How to write code

There are different aproches for writing code with i18n stacks (Example code showDialog("Server "+hostname+" is not reachable.") ):

1. showDialog(l("Server %s is not reachable.",hostname))
2. showDialog(l("%error.server-failed"))

I prefer the 1. solution.

Solutions I found:

• Dojo: http://dojotoolkit.org/reference-guide/1.8/dojo/i18n.html
• i18next.js http://i18next.com/
• jsperanto.js https://github.com/jpjoyal/jsperanto
• jed.js http://slexaxton.github.com/Jed/
• messageformat.js https://github.com/SlexAxton/messageformat.js
• jquery.i18n plugin http://recursive-design.com/projects/jquery-i18n/
  • wikimedia fork https://github.com/wikimedia/jquery.i18n
• l10n.js http://eligrey.com/blog/post/passive-localization-in-javascript

When I have free time, I will test this solutions to the criteria above.

from id.

started to evaluate the frameworks in a new repository. Please feel free to join, fork, make pull requests:

https://github.com/tabacha/javascript-i18n-example

from id.

Tacking something on to this: what we use for translation should be able to expose the current language code, so that the taginfo integration can choose the right language for documentation.

from id.

Here's another requirement: interpolations should be named or numbered, not positional. I.e. "Server {name} at {address} is not reachable.", rather than "Server %s at %s is not reachable." A translation may need to reorder the interpolations.

from id.

As far as dojo is concerned, all the requirements are met except "switch language without restart"
The requirement "Server {name} at {address} is not reachable." is met with dojo/string module: http://dojotoolkit.org/reference-guide/1.8/dojo/string.html

But there was the political decision to get rid of dojo :)

from id.

Yes, dojo is out of the picture at this point and re-including it for one feature is unlikely. Though, it was a technical decision, it's only political if you make it one :)

from id.

So far our translation needs are quite simple, so we implemented our own (12 loc) microframework. Will be easy enough to replace with something more heavy duty if needed.

from id.