i18n-js VS fluent.js

I'm using expo-localization, which uses i18n-js to localise my app fully except for the app name.

The origin of this format start Ruby. The i18n-js format is a direct export of translations defined by Ruby on Rails. To export the translations, a Ruby gem can be used, that's completely disconnected from Rails and that can be used for the solely purpose of exporting the translations, even if your project is written in a different language. For JavaScript there's a companion JavaScript package. It comes bundled with all base translations made available by rails-i18n. Base translations allow formatting date, numbers, and sentence connectors, among other things.

In most packages (i18next, i18n-js), the approach used to access translations is as follows:

I was working on an app built with React on Rails. Most of the pages were written in React, but some pages were written in and rendered from the Rails views. This meant that I needed to figure out a way to provide translations on both the backend and the frontend. I searched for articles and tutorials, but I couldn’t find one that was solving the same problem I had. I found a lot of tutorials on “i18n-ing” Rails apps, and some on Rails and Javascript, but not on Rails and React. After spending some time researching, I decided to try rails-i18n and i18n-js gems.

Want to quick internationalize your app? You can use com.hydroper.ftl from NPM, which uses Fluent. Should work for browser (if you use Webpack targetting "browser") and NodeJS. It uses Intl from ECMA-402 and @fluent/bundle.

Fluent is a localization system with more flexibility for translators. FTL means to Fluent Translation List. It seems to refer to the syntax used to define resources, which are (roughly) collections of messages.

In general though, translation is very hard. There are more exceptions than rules, and a lot of work has gone into the libraries to support all languages. consider using something like https://projectfluent.org/ if this isn't just a learning exercise.

Working on a personal project that needed localization I decided to use fluent from Mozilla. It already exists an excellent crate to use fluent in Rust which is fluent-bundle (and others fluent crates) but now that I'm used to "If it compiles, it works" I wanted to have a macro that checked that the "localization messages" I'm using existed and had all the required arguments, not finding what I was looking for I decided to write this crate for my needs and share it with the community.

Even if you're not planning to translate your game into other languages, it might be worth looking into one of the localisation systems. For example, Mozilla's Fluent handles pluralisation, gender, etc..

It's a tempting argument. By interviewing hundreds of people a different pattern emerged though. Translators don't know how to code. Some companies manually removed quotation marks (") from strings because they confused translators.

What do you think about Mozilla's Fluent format/syntax https://projectfluent.org/?

BTW feel free to reach out via email to me. Look at my profile to find it.

The last format in this multiverse trip is Fluent a Mozilla project. The Fluent format shares a lot of philosophy that drove the design of ICU Message Format.

My Elm code generator for i18n files Travelm-Agency has just reached a critical milestone: supporting all of projectfluents constructs. Yes, that means even locale specific constructs like matching on PluralRules (zero, one, few, many, other) or formatting dates and numbers based on the current locale! As far as I'm aware that is something that no other i18n solution for Elm can do so far.

As an example, there is a really good localisation framework called Project Fluent where you write your translatable expressions in a text file that later gets parsed. The resulting parse tree borrows entirely from the original text and doesn't make any allocations other than the occasional Vec for sequences.