translation

Library for localization (text translation) of Rust applications.

Features

• Autodetect user's locale (Windows, Unix).

• Small size - it doesn't depend on regex (like locale_config does).

• The localization files are embedded in the binary.

• It looks for localization files in the file system first, so new localization files can be added without application recompilation.

• It works great with cargo-i18n.

Minimal example:

use translation::{tr_init, tr};

#[derive(rust_embed::RustEmbed)]
#[folder = "i18n/mo"]
struct Translations;

fn main() {
    tr_init!("locale", Translations);

    println!("{}", tr!("Hello, world!"));
}

The files from i18n/mo source folder are embedded in the executable file. The tr_init! macro looks for (in the following order):

• locale/{lang}/LC_MESSAGES/{module_name}.mo in the file system
• locale/{lang}/{module_name}.mo in the file system
• {lang}/LC_MESSAGES/{module_name}.mo in the embedded Translations struct
• {lang}/{module_name}.mo in the embedded Translations struct

The locale folder is looked for relative to the application executable file.

For more examples how to use tr! macro (arguments, plurals, context etc.) please refer to tr crate documentation.

Dependencies

Current solution depends on the following crates:

• tr - the tr! macro
• gettext - reimplementation of gettext in Rust
• rust_embed - to embed locale in executable file

The crate was born because the tr crate (version 0.1.3 at the time of writing) is missing the tr_init! macro when used with gettext crate. Instead of creating pull request for tr crate I started experimenting with new crate and embedding translation files. In the future I plan to add support also for reading .po files directly (so no compilation step of .po files will be required).

Usage

Note. This instruction uses cargo-i18 tool. Please also read https://github.com/kellpossible/cargo-i18n for more information.

Configuration Steps

Install required tools:

cargo install xtr
cargo install cargo-i18n

Add the following to your Cargo.toml dependencies:

translation = "1"

Create an i18n.toml file in the root directory of your crate:

fallback_language = "en"

[gettext]
target_languages = ["pl"]
output_dir = "i18n"

Run cargo i18n tool:

cargo i18n

It scans the code and creates and updates the localization files. You can run it every time you want to update your localization files or compile po files.