Internationalization

When developing in pimentaCHAT, you have the ablilty to add strings to our translations files in wich later will be tranlsated to other languages by our community translators.

Tools Used

For selecting strings for the correct language we use the TAP:i18n meteor package.

For managing contributions from the translators community we use lingohub. If you are interested in contributing to pimentaCHAT translations please see Translating

Adding Strings to the Translation Files

To have a string translated you will firstly need a key that would be the identifier of the string you want translated, for example the string This room is read only should have the key as room_is_read_only. Please have in mind when naming a key that spaces should be replaced with underscores (_) and it should be named in english, as is the language selected for pimentaCHAT’s code. Finally you will have the key/value pair will look like this: "room_is_read_only": "This room is read only"

You can also specify placeholders, that will allow you to change information on the string via parameters when calling the i18n method. A parameter will be surrounded by two double underscores (__ __), and it will look like this, "Conversation_closed": "Conversation closed: __comment__." where __comment__ can be replaced by any string provided in the parameters.

After that you will need to add this key to its respective i18n.json file under the i18n folder.

When your pull request is merged, our contributors at LingoHub will be notified of the new string and start translating it.

Using Translated Strings on the code

Now that you have added your strings into the translation files, is time to use them in the code!

When writing on a .js file you can use the global method TAPi18n.__(). Now depending where you are calling this method from it can have different parameters.If you call it from the back-end of pimentaCHAT you will have to specify a language (in which you can normally grab from an user’s object). The method will look like this, TAPi18n.__('YOUR_KEY_HERE', {}, user.language). You can also pass parameters on the second argument to replace placeholders on the translated strings. Now if you are calling from the front end you can simply use TAPi18n.__('YOUR_KEY_HERE', {}) that will translate the selected string to the user’s current selected language.

If the selected key is not present in the respective .i18n.json file it will default it to english, if no key is found it will display the key inserted in the method as a string.

Now if you are in a .html file, you can simply surround the string with {{_ }} for example {{_ YOUR_KEY_HERE}}. It will work the same as the method mentioned above, only with the convenience of adding it directly to the .html file.

Sometimes you can find some methods that requires an object with a i18nLabel or i18nDescription. In these cases you only need to insert the key of the string, the method will do the rest.