Re: [Haskell-cafe] haskell i18n best practices

On Fri, Sep 30, 2011 at 2:09 PM, Felipe Almeida Lessa wrote:

On Fri, Sep 30, 2011 at 5:44 PM, Rogan Creswick wrote:

...

The grammatical framework excels at translation and localization -- it probably has the highest learning curve of the options; but it will generate the best / most accurate text depending on the target language:

 * http://www.grammaticalframework.org

At first brush, it may seem like extreme overkill; but it is able to handle many, many infuriating corner cases (eg: properly forming discontinuous constituents, updating case / tense and number to agree with potentially variable quantities and genders, addressing the absence of "yes" and "no" in some languages, etc...)

The language processing bits are expressed in a PMCFG grammar, which uses a syntax similar to haskell.  The PMCFG compiles to a PGF file that can be loaded and used by a haskell module that implements the runtime, so it doesn't change your run-time requirements (if you already rely on haskell, there are also runtime implementations in javascript, java, c and python).

I've seen GF before, but I can't actually see how one would use it for localization.  Are there any simple examples?

Here's a *very* simple example I just threw together, based on the Foods grammar (so it's quite contrived), but hopefully it's sufficient for the moment: https://github.com/creswick/gfI8N Updating it to use the Phrasebook example would make it much more interesting... I think there are numbers in there, and iirc, it uses the actual resource grammars, which is what you really want for a real system. Usage details in the README.md, and I've commented the important function in the haskell source. The rest of the magic is in the (also ugly) Setup.hs. You will also need to manually install gf, I believe, even if you use cabal-dev, due to some annoyingly complex (but solveable) build-order and PATH complications. --Rogan