Comment by cyberax
6 months ago
Many moons ago, a small project called GNU Gettext did this. It worked by annotating the translatable string literals like this _("SomeLine"), then a separate compiler extracted all the strings into a `.po` file.
And then you just translated them. The English text, essentially, becomes your string ID.
It worked super well, with very low friction for programmers. You didn't have to invent an identifier when writing code, and then switch to a horrible JSON with indefinitely long lists of strings.
But somehow, the world chose the horribly bad "string IDs" method of translation. Sigh.
Good point. There are JavaScript tools that do that for js devs, but since oftentimes you end up having <a>links</a> and <b>nested <i>elements</i></b> in the code, wrapping becomes problematic and hard to maintain at scale.
I think there's a chance compile-time, AST/CST solutions might be the ultimate, O(1) i18n approach that doesn't distract. Ideally it should come out of the box with the framework, but perhaps this future is a little bit too far away just yet.
For HTML, it probably needs to be extended to the HTML fragments themselves. And with React, it's pretty easy to actually extract the text fragments in {} segments.