Internalization in Play2 can be done with Message.get("home.title") and language files. What about when you internalizate a page full of textual content and not just one specific header or link?
For example doing Messagefile for a long page representing e.g. product info:
_First header_
Some paragraphs of text
...
_Tenth header_
Tenth paragraph and more text*
Messagefile
a)
product.info = "<many paragraphs of text including headers>"
or splitting one page into html elements
b)
product.info.h1 = "<first header>"
product.info.p1 = "<first para>"
product.info.p2 = "<2nd para>"
For me both solutions doesn't sound right. In first having a vast value for a single key seems bad convention and in latter separating a single page into dozens of keys doesn't sound good either.
Big websites often follow the convention www.site.com/en-us/product/1 of having the language in the URL. So the question is, how do i do in this way and is doing in this way a better way at all? I could easily end up not just translating to dozen languages but doing also dozen times layout changes.
I could use global codesnippets using Messagefile for elements that have a little text and doesn't change often e.g. navigation /view/global/header/somenavbar.scala.html but then i end up only having a complex folder structure.
Another way, a best practise, in Play 2 for internalization than messagefile?
Take a look to the Joscha Feth's solution in play_authenticate Java sample.
There are templates for emails in 3 languages for email confirmation, password reseting etc.
Template for each 'type' of email && each language is kept in single file ie:
_password_reset_en.scala.html
_password_reset_de.scala.html
_password_reset_pl.scala.html
_verify_email_en... etc
And for each 'type' there is an 'parent' template, which contains a condition (common Scala's match check the Tags section of template doc) which returns rendered view depending on detected language:
password_reset.scala.html
Finally, yes, at the beginning I also thought that some kind of madness, but believe me, that technique can be useful. There's field for further improvements I think. Maybe it would be better to move the language conditioning to the controller, hm I think that depends on many factors and it will be great if you'll find a time to investigate this topic.
Related
I need to create a universal web scraper to parse articles on the different websites. Of course, I know about XPath, but I want to try to make it universal for any website despite the HTML markup of a page.
I need to determine whether there is an article on the page and if it is - parse a text of title, body and tags (if exists).
Frankly speaking, my knowledge in DS is not very huge, but I assume this task (determine whether it is article, and parsing only needed parts) is possible to solve.
What tools should I use? Any help?
Actually, for the second task, I need to implement something similar that google chrome mobile does. When page is not optimised for mobile, then propose to show the page in adaptive mode (just title, and main content).
If you are using Python, some libraries to look at are:
scrapy, which scrapes data and can extract some of the results) and,
BeautifulSoup, which is more geared towards the extraction part itself.
It is possible to request a version of a website (e.g. for Chrome, Safari, Mobile, old-school systems) by creating a custom header for your scraper.
HAve a look at the relevant documentation, and you can get an idea of how to use headers in scrapy here.
I do not know of any more specialised tools. Your tasks are more analytical and are typically not performed with the use of models for estimating e.g. what content is where on a webpage. This might be an intersting research direction though; to see if you can create a model that generalises across many websites to extract the desired content.
That leads me on to my last point, which is to say that creating a single scraper that works for any website *containing your artile type) is not usually possible. People create websites differently, however they see fit, which means they also change them. This usually leads to a good scraper requiring constant updates as time (and developers) moves on.
EDIT:
Then if you have lots of labelled examples, it might be possible to train a model. The challenge might be the look-back range of the model. For example, a typical LSTM model is given a parameter that tells it how far to look back into the past. It is stored within its memory internally. In your case, you might be looking for a start and end HTML tag of an article, to then extract just that part. These tahs could be thousands of words apart. Something a standard LSTM might not be fit to retain and use.
If you could pose your problem a little differently, then there are other approaches that might be plausible. E.g., you could make it a "question-answer" problem, by saying: I have this HTML, where is the article content? If that sounds ok for your use-case, have a look here for some model based approaches.
I've got a rather large asciidoc document that I translate dynamically to PDF for our developer guide. Since the doc often refers to Java classes that are documented in our developer guide we converted them into links directly in the docs e.g.:
In this block we create a new
https://www.codenameone.com/javadoc/com/codename1/ui/Form.html[Form]
named `hi`.
This works rather well for the most part and looks great in HTML as every reference to a class leads directly to its JavaDoc making the reference/guide process much simpler.
However when we generate a PDF we end up with something like this on some pages:
Normally I wouldn't mind a lot of footnotes or even repeats from a previous page. However, in this case the link to Container appears 3 times.
I could remove some of the links but I'd rather not since they make a lot of sense on the web version. Since I also have no idea where the page break will land I'd rather not do it myself.
This looks to me like a bug somewhere, if the link is the same the footnote for the link should only be generated once.
I'm fine with removing all link footnotes in the document if that is the price to pay although I'd rather be able to do this on a case by case basis so some links would remain printable
Adding these two parameters in fo-pdf.xsl remove footnotes:
<xsl:param name="ulink.footnotes" select="0"></xsl:param>
<xsl:param name="ulink.show" select="0"></xsl:param>
The first parameter disable footnotes, which triggers urls to re-appear inline.
The second parameter removes urls from the text. Links remain active and clickable.
Non-zero values toggle these parameters.
Source:
http://docbook.sourceforge.net/release/xsl/1.78.1/doc/fo/ulink.show.html
We were looking for something similar in a slightly different situation and didn't find a solution. We ended up writing a processor that just stripped away some of the links e.g. every link to the same URL within a section that started with '==='.
Not an ideal situation but as far as I know its the only way.
In general, translation methods take a key > value mapping and use the key to transform that into a value. Now I recognize two different methods to name your translation keys and within my team we do not come to consensus what seems to be the best method.
Method 1:
Use full English words or sentences:
Name => Name
Please enter your email address => Please enter your email address
Method 2:
Use keywords describing the situation:
NAME => Name
ENTER_EMAIL => Please enter your email address
I personally prefer method #1 because it directly shows the meaning of the message. If the translation is not present, you could fall back to the key and this doesn't cause any problems. However, the method is cumbersome when a translation changes frequently, because all the files need to be updated. Also for longer texts these keys become very large. This is solved by using keys like ENTER_EMAIL, but the phrasing is completely out of the context. The list of abstract translation keys would be huge, you need meta data for all the keys explaining their usage and collisions can occur much easier.
Is there a best of both worlds or a third method? How do you use translation keys in your application? In our case it is a php-based webapplication, but I think above problem is generic enough to talk about i18n in general.
This is a question that is also faced by iOS/OSX developers. And for them there is even a standard tool called genstrings which assumes method 1. But of course Apple developers don't have to use this tool--I don't.
While the safety net that you get with method 1 is nice (i.e you can display the key if you somehow forgot to localize a string) it has the downside that it can lead to conflicting keys. Sometimes one identical piece of display text needs to be localized in two different ways, due to grammar rules or differences in context. For instance the French translation for "E-mail" would be "E-mail" if it's a dialog title and "Envoyer un e-mail" if it's a button (in French the word "E-mail" is only a noun and can't be used as a verb, unlike in English where it's both a noun and a verb). With method 2 you could have keys EMAIL_TITLE and EMAIL_BUTTON to solve this issue, and as a bonus this would give a hint to translators to help them translate correctly.
One more advantage of method 2 is that you can change the English text without having to worry about updating the key in English and in all your localizations.
So I recommend method 2!
Why not use both worlds? I use method #1 for short strings, and method #2 for long strings that are full sentences. I am not afraid to mix both in the same file.
For example, in the following string the text may change if in a new app version the user experience is modified:
"screen description" = "Tap the plus button to add a new item. Tap an item for more options or to edit its details.";
So here it makes sense to apply method #2.
However, for simple strings like in the following example, method #1 is more useful:
"Preferences" = "Preferences";
In general when people try to standardize things it often appears restrictive to me. Personally, I prefer a more "anarchistic" approach where several methods are valid (not only as in this method #1 vs method #2 thread, but also for example when a team of developers fight over coding style).
I have a string with urls in them.
eg: Under maintenance. Try again after sometime
I want to pass the complete string to the translators.
I see that there are two options
1. label.maintenance = Under maintenance. {0}Try again{1} after sometime (pass with anchor tags as variables)
2. label.maintenance = Under maintenance. Try again after sometime (pass the string with html)
In the first case if the translator misplaces {0} and {1} that may spoil the format of my page.
In the second case, the translator has to understand html and can possibly inject incorrect links.
What is the best way to achieve this?
I had this problem multiple times before and I came to conclusion that second option is best. Although it requires that translator know what HTML is all about, it turns out it gives the best results.
It communicates clearly what is a link here and if translator needs to re-order the sentence (which happens just too often), (s)he knows what part belongs to link.
In the first example, translator wouldn't know why the sentence contains placeholders and what to do with them. At best (s)he will ask. At worst, translator could re-order them or move translated "Try again" somewhere else and put another word between placeholders.
The conclusion is: leave HTML in translatable resources. At the same time, try to hire experienced software translators as oppose to regular translators. Chances are high they would understand Localization concepts and they would use common glossary of software terms (i.e. the one from Microsoft). That would make your software easier understandable for end users and decrease Localization defects that you will need to fix. In the end hiring software translator may cost less than "cheap" regular one...
We do have a website which should be translate into different languages. Some of the wording is in message properties files ready for translation. I want now add the rest of the text into these files.
What is a good way to name the text blocks?
<view>.<type>.<name>
We mostly have webpages and some of the elements/modules are repeating on some sites.
As far as I know, no "standard" exists. Therefore it is pretty hard to tell what is proper and what is improper way of naming resource keys. However, based on my experience, I could recommend this way:
property file name: <module>.properties
resource keys: <view or dialog>[.<sub-context>].<control-type>.<name>
We may discuss if it is proper way to put every strings from one module into one property files - probably it could be right if updates doesn't happen often and there are not so many messages. Otherwise you might think about one file per view.
As for key naming strategy: it is important for the Translator (sounds like film with honorable governor Arnold S. isn't it?) to have a Context. Translation may actually depend on it, i.e. in Polish you would translate a message in a different way if it is page/dialog/whatever title and in totally different way if it is text on a button.
One example of such resource key could be:
preferences.password_area.label.username=User name
It gives enough hints to the Translator about what it actually is, which could result in correct translation...
We have come up with the following key naming convention (Java, btw) using dot notation and camel case:
Label Keys (form labels, page/form/app titles, etc...i.e., not full sentences; used in multiple UI locations):
If the label represents a Java field (i.e., a form field) and matches the form label: label.nameOfField
Else: label.sameAsValue
Examples:
label.firstName = First Name
label.lastName = Last Name
label.applicationTitle = Application Title
label.editADocument = Edit a Document
Content Keys:
projectName.uiPath.messageOrContentType.n.*
Where:
projectName is the short name of the project (or a derived name from the Java package)
uiPath is the UI navigation path to the content key
messageOrContentType (e.g., added, deleted, updated, info, warning, error, title, content, etc.) should be added based on the type of content. Example messages: (1) The page has been updated. (2) There was an error processing your request.
n.* handles the following cases: When there are multiple content areas on a single page (e.g., when the content is separated by, an image, etc), when content is in multiple paragraphs or when content is in an (un)ordered list - a numeric identifier should be appended. Example: ...content.1, ...content.2
When there are multiple content areas on a page and one or more need to be further broken up (based on the HTML example above), a secondary numeric identifier may be appended to the key. Example: ...content.1.1, ...content.1.2
Examples:
training.mySetup.myInfo.content.1 = This is the first sentence of content 1. This is the second sentence of content 1. This content will be surrounded by paragraph tags.
training.mySetup.myInfo.content.2 = This is the first sentence of content 2. This is the second sentence of content 2. This content will also be surrounded by paragraph tags.
training.mySetup.myInfo.title = My Information
training.mySetup.myInfo.updated = Your personal information has been updated.
Advantages / Disadvantages:
+ Label keys can easily be reused; location is irrelevant.
+ For content keys that are not reused, locating the page on the UI will be simple and logical.
- It may not be clear to translators where label keys reside on the UI. This may be a non-issue for translators who do not navigate the pages, but may still be an issue for developers.
- If content keys must be used in more than one location on the UI (which is highly likely), the key name choice will not make sense in the other location(s). In our case, management is not concerned with a duplication of values for content areas, so we will be using different keys (to demonstrate the location on the UI) in this case.
Feedback on this convention - especially feedback that will improve it - would be much appreciated since we are currently revamping our resource bundles! :)
I'd propose the below convention
functionalcontext.subcontext.key
logicalcontext.subcontext.key
This way you can logically group all the common messages in a super context (id in the below example). There are few things that aren't specific to any functional context (like lastName etc) which you can group into logical-context.
order.id=Order Id
order.submission.submit=Submit Order
name.last=Last Name
the method that I have personally used and that I've liked more so far is using sentence to localisee as the key. For example: (pls replace T with the right syntax dependably on the language)
for example:
print(T("Hello world"))
in this case T will search for a key "Hello world". If it is not found then the key is returned, otherwise the value of the key.
In this way, you do not need to edit the message (in your default language) at least that you need to use parameters.... It saved me a LOT of dev time