[keycloak-dev] i18n/l10n: English text in java code

[Stian Thorgersen]

I'm not sure I'm buying into the argument that displaying the key is better
for developers. Having English suddenly pop-up in a German translation is
just as obvious as a key. Besides as Stan points out you catch missing keys
by comparing missing keys between English and German.

However, if there is a mistake in a translation then a user may quite
likely be able to interpret English text, while a user will not be able to
interpret a key. So if a key is missing in a translation (which is
obviously a "bug") it's better to display English than to display the key.

On 8 October 2015 at 14:13, Stan Silvert <ssilvert at redhat.com> wrote:

> On 10/8/2015 12:48 AM, Thomas Raehalme wrote:
>
>
> On Oct 8, 2015 6:53 AM, "Stian Thorgersen" <sthorger at redhat.com> wrote:
> >
> > With regards to internationalization I have two questions:
> >
> > * Should we fallback to English messages if a key is missing in a
> translation? Alternative is to show key, but that's not going to help anyone
>
> A missing key is a bug and showing the message in the default locale may
> hide the problem.
>
> Even though showing the key does not help the end user it helps the
> developer and identifies the problem. For this reason I think showing the
> key would be a good idea.
>
> For our bundles, we could catch missing keys at build time.
>
> Failing that, I agree that displaying the key is better than falling back
> to English.  This is especially true right now while we haven't completed
> the task of converting everything.  If we fall back to English we won't
> know if the problem is a missing key or if the text just hasn't been
> converted yet.
>
> > * Should we change message bundles to UTF-8? Or is ISO 8859-1 going to
> work for all languages?
>
> Depends what those all languages are :-)
>
> I think UTF-8 is the best choice as it will handle practically any
> character.
>
> But if you're referring to Java resource bundles the encoding for
> .properties is ISO-8859-1 but there are means to handle any UTF-8 character.
>
> Yes, an UTF-8 character can be encoded in ISO-8859-1.  Java provides a
> native2ascii tool for converting entire files.  The resource bundle tools
> in most IDE's do this for you automatically.  So you just edit as UTF-8 and
> it saves the bundle as ISO-8859-1.
>
> We can read our bundles as UTF-8 if we want to do that.  I'd rather not,
> because I'm not sure what we might run into down the road with Java
> assuming resource bundles are always ISO-8859-1.
>
> But I'd like to get the perspective of people who have handled resource
> bundles in languages that are not fully supported by ISO-8859-1.  Is it too
> much of a pain to do a conversion or do the tools make the process seamless?
>
> Best regards,
> Thomas
>
> >
> > On 7 October 2015 at 18:42, Stan Silvert <ssilvert at redhat.com> wrote:
> >>
> >> Marko brought this to my attention yesterday.  For some things, we
> >> dynamically create UI.  In this case, the java code contains the English
> >> text and it needs to be localized.  Luckily, the solution was pretty
> >> straightforward.  We just replace the English text with a key into the
> >> message bundle.  The html template that displays this text already pulls
> >> from an Angular scope so we just leave that alone and pass it through
> >> the |translate filter.  You do need to also add the double-colon.
> >>
> >> One nice side effect is that if the key is not found in the bundle then
> >> the output of the translate filter is the unchanged text.  This means
> >> that any code which has not converted to using bundle keys will still
> >> work as expected.   And, any third-party providers can just pass in
> >> plain text if they don't care about l10n.  If they ever do care about
> >> l10n we will just need to provide a means for them to add key/value
> >> pairs to the resource bundles.
> >>
> >> Here is an example for anyone who needs to localize English text
> >> embedded in java:
> >>
> https://github.com/ssilvert/keycloak/commit/c9437595b70810c4472325373dd8833c37be8549
> >>
> >> Stan
> >> _______________________________________________
> >> keycloak-dev mailing list
> >> keycloak-dev at lists.jboss.org
> >> https://lists.jboss.org/mailman/listinfo/keycloak-dev
> >
> >
> >
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>
>
>
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