Translations management for a web project
Multi-language web project usually may be imagined as national flags icons on the design. For multi-language support in web development commonly using JSON to simplify translations management. Management of translations for web projects in some cases may be a very difficult challenge.
What is multi-language?
Most of web projects launching every day are built on one language. When the project needs to provide its information to several languages, then we have several ways to solve translations. Three main approaches to translate your project:
- static, with prepared translations in the development stage;
- dynamic, when translations preparing “on the flight”;
- hybrid, a combination of two above - when used static translations for less changing parts of a web project with dynamically changed content.
Each way has advantages and disadvantages:
- Static. Each language prepared in the development stage and tied with the code. These translations could be cached so the end user will see a faster response of content. This type of translations hard to manage because of the development process. This approach is very stable.
- Dynamic. Texts translated with a service or functionality for automatic translations. This type of translations are good manageable, but the cost could be very high depending on the traffic of web project. This approach has low stability because of the translation integration process.
- Hybrid. The less changed texts (titles, notification messages, etc.) moved to the static, tied with the code. Content (news, products descriptions, blog posts, etc.) generating dynamically with (or without) storing in the database or cache. This approach is pretty stable (user at least will always see the project UI) and dynamic content will be loaded as soon it will be translated.
Check out a tool which can help with all this stuff, to simplify the process of translations management in web projects.
Weblocale [“web” “locale” — web language or web languages] is a new way to manage translations of a web project.
Main key features
To build this instrument there are were checked a lot of tools and approaches. There are really many of them. But most of them are very narrow specialized.
Weblocale created with simplicity in mind. Key features should be easy to understand and really important to the process of translations management:
- easy and fast setup (no unnecessary fields);
- translations comparison (this is really important in case of management 5+ languages with 300+ keys);
- automated translation between 60+ languages (ability to translate vice-versa);
- flat structure of keys (keys paths conversion to the single line key and back);
- JSON for import/export (the most popular approach to store languages in web development);
- projects management (you can set up as many projects as you need).
Afterwords
After checking with real projects with 2+ languages saved time and the simplified process are really impressive.
Thanks for comments and claps.
