[jbosstools-dev] Internationalising JBoss Tools

[Sean Flanigan]

Rob Stryker wrote:
> Honestly, our product has so much code I'd be surprised if the 
> translatable strings were really an issue in terms of size.
> 
> How many languages do we routinely translate into?  Most of my plugins 
> don't have more than 100 translatable strings, and several have much 
> less than that.

For now, I gather that the target is about six languages, other than
English.

> I think it could be feasible to just include *all* translated 
> .properties files in the build with the proper language suffixes and let 
> eclipse / NLS load the proper one on their own. If you ever trace 
> through NLS you'd see how easy this is actually.

True.  I already have to add the suffixes (eg messages_xxx.properties)
to make the fragments anyway; I think org.eclipse.osgi.util.NLS uses
virtually the same file naming scheme as java.util.ResourceBundle.

In compressed jar form, the [xxx] pseudo-translation is about 270KB.
Assuming the average translation is a more generous 500KB, that makes
about 3 MB for the lot, so, no, not that huge.  On the other hand, the
number of languages will probably grow with time, as will the string
count.  Just something to keep in mind.  We could always shift some or
all languages into lang-packs in the future, if we need to.

Including the translated properties files in the existing
bundles/plugins *would* save us from having to define lang-pack features.

But I think it would still be safest to keep the translations separate
from the source code, in a separate part of the source tree, and we
still have to get the generated properties files on to the classpath at
runtime/build-time.  That shouldn't be terribly difficult.

-- 
Sean Flanigan

Senior Software Engineer
Engineering - Internationalisation
Red Hat

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