Web: Support for translations/language packs

[bpasero]

Currently we do not support switching display language in the web.

[yuxuan]

We currently mainly depend on VSCode web. And our main language is not English. It would be great helpful to us if VSCode web can support localization on web. Thanks.

[jsjoeio]

Hi there!

I'm one of the maintainers of coder/code-server. We've (@code-asher and myself) modified our vscode fork to support changing the display language. Here is the PR: coder#34

@TylerLeonhardt I see you're planning to look into this for Jan. 2022. Is this something we can help with?

[TylerLeonhardt]

@jsjoeio If I understand the change correctly, you essentially offload all translation handling to the remote side? Yeah this would be generally good for any "server-full" vscode offerings. If you would like to contribute a similar change, we'd love that!

That solution won't work for serverless environments like vscode.dev so we'll have to approach that differently.

[jsjoeio]

@TylerLeonhardt yes! Awesome. I'll see if I can get started on this next week.

[jsjoeio]

Heads-up. Some other priorities have come up and I haven't been able to get to this yet. I hope to soon, but if not, someone else feel free to tackle.

[Mister-Hope]

Emm, this issue title is hard to search, could we mention it in https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/getstarted/locales that it's not supported on the web yet and ask user to track this issue?

Also, could we change the issue title into something like "Language pack support for web"? It's exacly the last 3 duplicate issue title

[TylerLeonhardt]

@gregvanl what are your thoughts on updating the doc that @Mister-Hope suggested?

[TylerLeonhardt]

@jsjoeio FYI, I may end up tackling the part that you did later this month (translations working when there's compute on the server side) because it's a feature we're looking to light up.

I just wanna let you know because I think it would be awesome to see this contributed by the community especially since you already did the work basically :) but also no pressure whatsoever. If you beat me to it, awesome. If not, totally fine of course!

[jsjoeio]

Oh awesome!

I agree, it would be really cool for us to contribute that back :) Well, if I can squeeze it in this month, I will. Thanks for the heads-up!

[gregvanl]

Added mention that VS Code for the Web doesn't support Language Packs microsoft/vscode-docs@da8ff66

[TylerLeonhardt]

🌐 ⚠️ 📣 I have published a new version of vscode-nls and merged in the PRs (one and two) into Core that should enable translations for the web for built-in extensions. I have also updated Azure Repos extension as the guinea pig to make sure this all works properly.

This means that at this point, all “feature bits” are done with translations for the web. We just have some bugs to iron out. Since those bugs are tracked in other issues I will close this now.

Tomorrow, all built-in extensions should be localized and the Azure Repos extension. If all goes smoothly, I'll start updating other extensions to take advantage of these changes.

[jsjoeio]

@TylerLeonhardt that's wonderful to hear! When will this be available in Core/Stable release?

(asking because that will allow us to remove our patch)

[TylerLeonhardt]

Unfortunately, I need to reopen this as we need to take a slightly different approach.

[vedg]

We need this feature for https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-dev/issues/477 as well.

[TylerLeonhardt]

With the new l10n API that has been finalized, this item is "done". #164438 will track onboarding built-in extensions to the new API.