Fuchsia internationalization and localization

This Dart package contains the support for Fuchsia 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.

Adding a dependency

To make the library available to other packages, add a dependency:

//sdk/dart/fuchsia_internationalization_flutter"

to the dependencies in the appropriate BUILD.gn rule of your package.

Importing the new dependency

To import the new dependency, add the import:

import 'package:fuchsia_internationalization_flutter/internationalization.dart';

to the import section of any Dart file that needs strings.

Referring to localized 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.

Generating localizable libraries

Two scripts are provided in the ./scripts directory. One is ./scripts/run_extract_to_arb.sh, which produces a “translation interchange form” in the form of ARB files. The ARB files can be translated independently of the source code, and should be checked into the code base for now.

Translating

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.

Generating Dart runtime format for the translations

Once translated you can use the file ./scripts/run_generate_from_arb.sh to generate the Dart code that wires up the translation. You will need to rebuild the entire project to take the new translations in.