Taal

Taal is a framework for translating your data. It plugs in to e.g. SQLAlchemy or Kaiso, providing a TranslatableString field type and a mechanism for storing and retrieving content in multiple languages.

For use-cases where the most common interaction with the translated data is for reading, an application can be set up so that language context and translations are handled centrally, after which business logic can be written almost as it would for a single-language app.

Philosophy

Taal uses a two-phase process for managing translatable data. Upon retrieval, data is marked up as "requires translation". Subsequently (typically higher up in the stack, e.g. in some middleware), information about which particular language we are interested in may be supplied to find the actual translation string.

Example use

class MyModel(Base):
    __tablename__ = "my_model"

    id = Column(Integer, primary_key=True)
    name = Column(TranslatableString())

>>> instance = session.query(MyModel).first()
>>> instance.name
<TranslatableString: (...)>

>>> translator = get_translator('en')
>>> translator.translate(instance.name)
"Spam"

Development

To make your life easier, create a setup.cfg file with a [pytest] section to define your database and neo4j connection strings:

$ cat setup.cfg
[pytest]
addopts= --neo4j_uri=http://... --db_uri=mysql://...

(Note that pytest gets upset if you indent the addopts line)