Javascript localization library

[nijel]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
Sometimes it would be useful to translate static HTML content. Typical use case could be our static error page.

Describe the solution you'd like

• Javascript library to load the translations and inject them into the page
  • The initial implementation can only support strings manually marked in the HTML for translation
  • Might be based on Django gettext library later to support usage from the javascript
• Strings export addon for Weblate to push localized strings to JSON
  • Should be served externally to make it available when Hosted Weblate is down

Describe alternatives you've considered
Right now, the error page is not localized, what is not nice and people tend to complain about that.

Additional context
WeblateOrg/hosted#35

[nijel]

Played a bit with this, the basic text extraction and replacement could be:

document.querySelectorAll('*').forEach(function(node) {
    if (node.children.length === 0 && node.textContent) {
        console.log(node.textContent); 
        node.textContent='x';
    }
});

[julen]

Why not generate language-specific HTML files and serve them by default based on Accept-Language headers? Seems like a simpler solution to me.

[nijel]

It would work in this use case, but the intention is to support localization of static pages in general. GitHub pages might be another example of things which could be localized by it.

[julen]

If it's for static pages I honestly think HTML is the way to go — I might miss some context, but in principle there's no strong technical reason to err on using JS there. JS localization should be left for SPAs and interactive components.

[nijel]

I'm not expert in that, but we got several questions on that topic. AFAIK GitHub doesn't support serving localized page depending on Accept-Language and generally localization of static or statically generated pages seem tricky for many users, while including JavaScript which does that seems easy.

[nijel]

Friend just pointed me to https://weglot.com/ which is basically built around this idea with some additional features (plugins for various CMS, server side proxying, ...).

[github-actions]

Thank you for your report, the issue you have reported has just been fixed.

• In case you see a problem with the fix, please comment on this issue.
• In case you see a similar problem, please open a separate issue.
• If you are happy with the outcome, consider supporting Weblate by donating.