Support Many Languages in R

An object model for source text and translations. Find and extract translatable strings. Provide translations and seamlessly retrieve them at runtime.

Introduction

R relies on GNU gettext to produce multi-lingual messages (if Native Language Support is enabled). This is well-designed software offering an extensive set of functionalities. It is ubiquitous and has withstood the test of time. It is not the objective of  transltr to (fully) replace it.

Package transltr provides an alternative in-memory object model (and further functions) to easily inspect and manipulate source text and translations.

✅ It does not change any aspect of the underlying locale.

✅ It has its own data serialization formats for I/O purposes. Source text and translations can be exported to text formats that are sharable and easily modifiable, even by non-technical collaborators.

✅ Its features are extensively documented (even internal ones).

✅ It can always locate and extract translatable strings (no matter where they are in the source code).

✅ Translatable source text is treated as a regular R object.

Installation

Install the package from your preferred CRAN mirror.

install.packages("transltr")

While an extensive set of unit tests fully covers the current version of transltr, some features could be modified in the future. Treat it as a beta version until version 1.0.0 is released.

Getting Started

Write code as you normally would. Whenever a piece of text (literal character vectors) should be available in multiple languages, pass it to method Translator$translate(). You may also use your own function.

tr <- transltr::translator()

# Write code.
cat(tr$translate("Hello, world!"), "\n")
cat(tr$translate("Farewell, world!"), "\n")

# Custom functions can also be used.
cat(internationalize("Hello, world!"), "\n")
cat(internationalize("Farewell, world!"), "\n")

1. Once you are ready to work on translating your project, call find_source(). This returns a Translator object.

   # Extract source text and create a new Translator object.
   find_source()
   
   # Use arg interface if a custom function was used.
   # You may also pass an existing Translator object.
   find_source(tr = tr, interface = quote(internationalize))
   find_source(tr = tr, interface = quote(pkg::internationalize))

2. Export the Translator object with translator_write(). Fill in the underlying translation files.

3. Import translations back into an R session with translator_read().

Current language and source language are respectively set with language_set() and language_source_get(). By default, the latter is set equal to "en"  (English).

Future Improvements

An informal and approximative roadmap for the package is available on GitHub.

Bugs and Feedback

You may submit bugs, request features, and provide feedback by creating an issue on GitHub.

Acknowledgements

Warm thanks to Jérôme Lavoué, who gladly supported and sponsored the first release of this project.