This Dart package contains the support for Ermine Shell localization and internationalization.
At its current state the support is in its very early phase. There is a lot of manual scaffolding that could be replaced by auto-generating the code of interest. Doing so will be the topic of followup work.
This package is purpose-built for the Ermine Shell. The central part is the file lib/strings.dart which by design contains all the strings that the Ermine Shell needs to vary based on the system locale.
Add a function to this file whenever you need to introduce a new text message.
To make the library available to other Ermine Shell packages, add a dependency:
"//src/experiences/session_shells/ermine/internationalization"
to the dependencies in the appropriate BUILD.gn rule of your package.
To import the new dependency, add the import:
import 'packages:internationalization/strings.dart';
to the import section of any Dart file that needs strings.
You can now refer to the messages defined in [strings.dart][lib/strings.dart]. For example, you can refer to the string Ask by calling Strings.ask(). This is done so that the localization system can substitute the word Ask for the appropriate word in the language defined by the current locale. The approach extends in similar ways for most strings; with slight variations depending on whether number or date, or plural or gender formatting is needed.
To generate the ARB files, please refer to the instructions in fuchsia_internationalization.
An example invocation is below, assuming that $FUCHSIA_DIR is set to the full path of the directory containing the Fuchsia checkout.
$FUCHSIA_DIR/topaz/public/dart/fuchsia_internationalization_flutter/scripts/run_extract_to_arb.sh
The translation process amounts to making ARB files for each of the supported locales of interest and providing the translations for the messages and strings. The basic tool for doing so would be a simple text editor. While there also exists a wealth of tools that help software translators, it is out of scope of this file to go into specific details. So the choice of the translation environment is left to the developer and translator.
Once translated you can use the file ./scripts/run_generate_from_arb.sh from fuchsia_internationalization library to generate the Dart code that wires up the translation. You will need to rebuild the entire project to take the new translations in.
An example invocation is below.
$FUCHSIA_DIR/topaz/public/dart/fuchsia_internationalization_flutter/scripts/run_generate_from_arb.sh
Internationalization and localization are topic unto themselves, and it is out of scope of this file to go into all the details. Please see the section on Internationalizing Flutter apps for many more details that are directly relevant to Dart and Flutter app localization.