Localization
Localization is implemented in all projects regardless of the number of supported locales.
This way, adding an extra locale (e.g. th_TH
) will not cause any difficulty in the future.
Services
Creating and maintaining translations can be a very tedious and manual process — think spreadsheets nightmares 😱. In addition, external stakeholders usually have the responsibility of translating the content from English to other languages. Therefore, prefer using third-party services like Phrase to manage localization strings.
The process usually involves the following steps:
- Developers push new localization keys or remove deprecated keys.
- External stakeholders - i.e. the client, translate the content.
- Developers pull the translated content into the project. This step often happens at build time (mobile application) or upon deployment (web application).
An Example of Workflow
When using a translation tool such as Phrase, the following workflow is recommended. Like any solution, there are considerations and trade-offs that every developer must know.
Workflow
This workflow is available in the Lucid app.
Considerations
The workflow above integrates the following considerations:
- It removes the conflicts of newly added translations by only pushing translations from the shared branches — i.e.
main
ordevelop
. Pushing fromfeature
branches might create conflicts. For example, if feature A pushes its new translations, and later, feature B does the same: the translations from feature A might be removed from Phrase. If some translation work has started for feature A, it might also have been lost in this event. - Developers are not waiting for translations to work, so there is no bottleneck.
- Pushing translations (i.e. new translation keys from developers) is automatic — this minimizes the risk of “forgotten push” and assures translators can do their work at the earliest, before the deployment into production.
- Pulling translations is automatic and occurs just before building/deploying the app — this ensures the app is deployed with the latest translations.
Trade-offs
This workflow includes trade-offs that developers need to know and carefully consider:
- When a translation key should be changed, developers cannot simply change the key in the
yml
files. Instead, they need to add a new key, deploy the application, and ensure translators have moved all translations to the new key. Only then can the developers remove the deprecated key from theyml
files. - When a translation key should be removed, developers first have to ensure the key is not being used in the application in any environment — i.e.
production
,staging
, … - After a while, developers might have an outdated version of their local translations, for that, they can perform a manual pull from time to time, and persist it in the source code. This will not impact the deployed applications but it can ease the development and local testing activities.
- Both the
staging
andproduction
environments use the same translations. Pros: Translators do not have to manage two working spaces, there is no duplicated work and fewer opportunities for mistakes. Cons: Renaming or deleting a key requires the developers to apply a depreciation process. Such a manual process is a door for mistakes.