traduki

An asset translation toolkit for Rust, which compiles asset files into the binary, but choses the appropriate translation at runtime via the LANG environment locale.

Probably only works on Linux/MacOS at the moment.

include!(concat!(env!("OUT_DIR"), "/traduki.rs"));

fn main() {
    use traduki::app;
    println!("{}: {}", app::name(), app::description());
}

Project state

This project is very new and developed with qaul.net as a testing ground, as part of the Rust CLI-WG. If you have feedback, feel free to send it to our mailing list!

The above example accesses translation data manually, but in the future it would be great if libraries (such as cli parsers, web servers, etc) could also access this data to make certain integrations easier. All of this is still very work in progress.

The problem

We've all built applications that handle user-facing text. Whether they are error messages, help messages, the general UI text, ... almost all application text can and should be translated into the user's preferred language to make using software as accessible as possible.

However, managing translations is hard, especially when it cames to accessing strings in different parts of an application, or even in multiple crates in the same workspace.

Additionally applications aren't the only things that can be translated: manual pages, help texts, even static websites can all be translated and generated with language specific texts.

Overview

traduki adds a "language assets" directory, in which users can create a losely managed structure of texts and asset files for translations.

Asset directory structure

A popular approach to handling translation assets is to have a top-level language section, followed by a custom tree of objects. The problem of this approach is that it makes it incredibly easy for different language trees to drift out of sync with each other.

Instead, traduki uses the "wikipedia model": at the top level is a set of categories, filled with sub-categories and "pages" (assets). Each asset is a folder which contains language specific files.

This way it's much easier to compare the state of translations for each language at a glance and discourages pages or sections to only exist in one language.

Format

Following is a very simple directory layout of how to use taduki. For more complex examples, check the examples directory.

assets/
├── clap
│   ├── create
│   │   ├── en_GB.yml
│   │   ├── eo.yml
│   │   └── fr_FR.yml
│   └── default
│       ├── en_GB.yml
│       ├── eo.yml
│       └── fr_FR.yml
└── manual
    ├── en_GB.yml
    ├── eo.yml
    └── fr_FR.yml

In this example the clap directory contains data regarding the CLI, grouped by subcommand (with default/ contains general arguments, the application name, version, disclaimer, etc.)

The manual section doesn't have sub-sections and is a simple leaf node (with three languages).

In your build.rs you should add this line

fn main() {
    set_var("TRADUKI_DEFAULT_LANG", "en_GB");
    traduki::bootstrap("assets");

}

In your Rust program (after initialising taduki, you will be able to get assets with crate::taduki::clap::create::my_key_here).