Orion/Internationalization

This page is a hub for resources relating to preparing Orion for use in other languages and locales (also known by the abbreviation i18n). This work involves translating strings into other languages (often called NLS for Natural Language Support), handling bi-directional text (BIDI), and preparing content such as dates and times in a format appropriate for a given locale.

Client

We are using i18n plugin of RequireJS, but to make our messages consumed by Babel we need to follow some extra rules. If you want to create a new messages file you need to add an "nls" directory with a given file structure:

nls/
   messages.js
   root/
      messages.js

Instead of "messages.js" we may use a different file name, but both *.js files need to have the same name.

The nls/messages.js file in the master file. It contains code and does not contain any strings for translation and will not be send for translation. This file should have format as follows:

Orion Editor does not have dependency to nlsutil, it should use 'orion/textview/util' import instead:

The nls/root/messages.js file is the root messages file, it contains externalized strings and is send to translation. For this reason it is very important that it kept the format as follows:

Orion Editor

We have been externalizing the editor/textview strings. This is probably the biggest task for most components in Orion (other than the editor). Of course, when strings are externalized, layout problems start showing up.

The editor also needs to make sure stuff like BIDI, IME, DBSC and Unicode Surrogates are all working properly. We paid some attention to these when we were first designing the editor, but there is lots of work to make the Orion editor BIDI aware to the same level of the Eclipse Desktop editor.

For the externalization of strings in the editor we used the i18n plugin of RequireJS. It works quite well and it is lightweight. The one function that is missing is a way to replace template strings like: "Line ${0} : Col ${1}", but this is a available in dojo (dojo.replace). The editor does not have a dependency on dojo, so we had to write our own.

Plugins

Plugins can contribute declarative metadata containing strings that may be shown to the user. This may include information about the plugin itself (author, license, etc), and service information (command names, tooltips). We currently do not have a mechanism for enabling externalization or substitution of these strings, but eventually we will need it.

Server

Most server strings are not currently externalized, but could easily be done using current Equinox API. The easy case is single language servers, where the natural language is provided when the server starts and it never changes. More complex would be multi-language servers where each request can have a different language and server uses the HTTP Accept-Language header to determine response language for that request. Equinox has not come up with a performant way to do this (see bug 226340), and any prerequisite dependencies such as org.eclipse.* libraries won't support it.