Textdomain support

[tagoh]

I'm opening this ticket to explain why I need the textdomain support on angjuar-gettext according to the conversation at #115.

The project I'm getting involved uses some external/3rd party AngularJS components that provides UI and widgets and contains some strings should be translatable. and some of them are accessible from apps even to change it to the unique strings and some of them aren't and they aren't supposed to let users modify as a design. so i18n has to be done in each components as opposed to what @rubenv suggested there.

There are two problems in this case:

1. all of components aren't necessarily under the control. centralizing all of translatable strings into one may be impossible.
2. duplicate translators' resource for components if centralizing them and going to get involved with projects that uses those components.

If the textdomain is supported, those are addressed and improved a lot.

This is the incident use case of the textdomain various projects take into account, and as documented in GNU gettext manual.

Hope it explains enough. please reconsider this support in angular-gettext.

[rubenv]

I don't really see an issue here.

As for point number 1: Each library can freely ship translation strings: multiple calls to gettextCatalog.getStrings() are supported, so just load each piece of strings independently and they'll be merged together as one. There's no real need to centralise things, just treat them as independent projects and load them together in the final app.

Number 2: Not sure what you mean here? Are you saying that you want to avoid duplicate translation work? Most translation tools / platforms support this: it's called a translation memory and it solves exactly this need (across projects).

I'm a bit confused though, since you're saying that you don't have control over some parts yet point 2 seems to imply that you do perform all the localisation?

Perhaps I'm missing things. I know that from the documentation domains sound great, but they don't solve any real problem which you can't solve today. I might be wrong though, so please show me a real example.

[tagoh]

Well, "merged together as one" is a problem. let's see, given that there are a string "create" can be translated. and one module may uses it as a menu item, one may uses it as in a dialog box with a noun. this depends on the language one is targeting for though, the translation may not necesssarily be able to share among them. e.g. both translations can be different in Japanese. so the outcome is really up to the context and the targeted language and it is different per the situation how they appear.
There might be another way to work around this sisuation but the textdomain will works well.

[rubenv]

so the outcome is really up to the context and the targeted language

For that purpose, you need contexts, not domains. See here for an example:

angular-gettext/test/unit/directive.js

Lines 42 to 50 in 98de893

	it("Should translate known strings according to defined translation context", function () {
	catalog.setCurrentLanguage("nl");
	var el = $compile("<div><h1 translate translate-context=\"verb\">Archive</h1></div>")($rootScope);
	$rootScope.$digest();
	assert.equal(el.text(), "Archiveren");
	el = $compile("<div><h1 translate translate-context=\"noun\">Archive</h1></div>")($rootScope);
	$rootScope.$digest();
	assert.equal(el.text(), "Archief");
	});

[tagoh]

Aha. is it documented somewhere? if not, would be nice to see it. thanks for that.

[rubenv]

Just noticed that it isn't, need to update the website!