Re: Website translations with Haunt

[sirgazil]

Hi :)

On 09/12/17 13:06, pelzflorian (Florian Pelz) wrote:
> Hello,
>
> First of all, I want to say thank you to the Guile, Haunt, ffi-helper
> and related projects’ developers.
>
> I built my personal website [1] using David Thompson’s Haunt [2] and
> recently talked my university’s Islamic Students’ Association
> (Islamische Hochschulvereinigung) into using Haunt for their
> not-yet-finished website as well, because I think the concept of Haunt
> and SHTML is superior to alternatives.  However in order to make the
> website multilingual (the user can choose to view it in German or
> English) so far I used an association list with assoc-ref which is not
> very comfortable since all strings have to be added in two places,
> i.e. in the SHTML code and in the association list where the code
> looks for translations.
>
> I want to ask for your thoughts on my new solution since translations
> are probably important to many Haunt users.  In particular, I believe
> there was some discussion on Website translation on the Guile or Guix
> lists as well.


I'm very interested on this subject because I help with Guile and Guix 
websites, and I usually work with multilingual websites. I have no idea 
of what would be the right way to do i18n of websites written in Scheme, 
though. So I will just join this conversation as a potential user of 
your solutions :)


> I did not want to use the ordinary gettext functions in order to not
> call setlocale very often to switch languages.  It seems the Gettext
> system is not designed for rapidly changing locales, but maybe I am
> wrong about this and very many setlocale calls would not be that bad.


For what is worth, I use ordinary gettext and `setlocale` in my website, 
which is not Haunt-based, but it is Guile Scheme and statically 
generated too. So far, it works ok.

For internationalization, I know the convention is to use _, but I don't 
like that, so I use the alias l10n instead.

For internationalizing complex blocks that should not be translated in 
fragments, like:


`(p "Hi! I play "
    (a (@ (href ,sport-url)) ,(l10n "futsal"))
    " in "
    (a (@ (href ,place-url)) ,(l10n "Tokyo")))


I had to write a procedure I call `interleave` that I use like this:


`(p
  ,@(interleave (l10n "Hi! I play ~SPORT~ in ~PLACE~.")
                `(a (@ (href ,sport-url)) ,(l10n "futsal"))
                `(a (@ (href ,place-url)) ,(l10n "Tokyo"))))


So, in the translation catalogs, translators will see the strings:


"Hi! I play ~SPORT~ in ~PLACE~."
"futsal"
"Tokyo"


Currently, I use xgettext manually and Poedit for working with 
translation catalogs, but I'd like to manage translations in the future 
like this (replace `site` with `haunt`):


# Create new translation catalogs for Finnish and Japanese.
$ site catalog-new fi ja

# Update translation catalogs with new translation strings.
$ site catalog-update

# Compile translation catalogs (generate .mo files)
$ site catalog-compile


To be fully localized, I also have to pass IETF Language Tags around in 
the website code, so that I get the right content when rendering the 
templates in a given language.

My 2¢