On Monday, February 21, 2011 at 12:46 AM, Michael Snoyman wrote:

The other day I was speaking with a woman on the train. She was
telling me about her daughters. I wanted to ask her how old they are,
but I got the pluralization wrong and instead of saying "bnot kama"
(plural) I said "bat kama," (singular) to which she responded 36.

tl;dr: You can offend people just was well with pluralization issues
as with gender issues.

Michael

On Mon, Feb 21, 2011 at 8:40 AM, Max Cantor <mxcantor@gmail.com> wrote:

Of course, you just pointed out one of the big difficulties with i18n.  I dont think you're wife would take kindly to you referring to her in the male gender.  so now, you need the person's gender too.  i18n is hard :(  the whole would should switch to esperanto.

max

On Feb 21, 2011, at 2:25 PM, Michael Snoyman wrote:

A proper i18n solution is high on my wish list right now, but I've
purposely avoided implementing one so far since I'd rather wait until
I think we have a good solution as opposed to implementing an
acceptable solution now. But let me share my ideas, it might help you
out here.

In general, it's very uncommon that you need a completely separate set
of templates for each language. Your markup, classes, styles, and
logic will likely be identical for each language, and creating a
separate template for each will just result in a lot of pain in the
long run. Instead, you're likely better off having a single template
and just translating strings.

I've blogged about this before[1]. My idea is to use a datatype for
your translatable strings, and then have a function that takes a
language and a value and returns the translated string. A simple
example:

   data Strings = Hello | Person String Int
   toEnglish Hello = "Hello"
   toEnglish (Person name age) = name ++ " is " ++ show age ++ "
years old" -- obviously need to check if person is 1 year old and
correct

   toHebrew Hello = "שלום"
   toHebrew (Person name age) = name ++ " הוא בן " ++ show age ++ " שנים"

The nice thing about this approach is you have the full power of
Haskell to address typical translation issues, such as pluralization,
word order and gender matching. (As a counter example, at work, we use
XSLT for this, and then you get the full power of XSLT for solving the
problem ::cringe::.)

You can then use the languages[2] function from Yesod to help you out:

   getRenderString = chooseFunc `fmap` languages
      where
        chooseFunc [] = toEnglish -- default language
        chooseFunc ("en":_) = toEnglish
        chooseFunc ("he":_) = toHebrew
        chooseFunc (_:x) = chooseFunc x

Then you can write a handler function like:

getPersonR name age = do
   render <- getRenderString
   defaultLayout [$hamlet|
<h1>#{render Hello}
<p>#{render $ Person name age}
|]

Which will work for English and Hebrew just fine. Ideally, I would
like to add support to Hamlet for this directly, involving a String
rendering function similar to the URL rendering function already in
place. But for the moment, this should work.

I'd love to hear peoples opinions about this.

Michael

[1] http://docs.yesodweb.com/blog/i18n-in-haskell
[2] http://hackage.haskell.org/packages/archive/yesod-core/0.7.0.1/doc/html/Yesod-Request.html#v:languages

On Sun, Feb 20, 2011 at 11:19 PM, Dmitry Kurochkin
<dmitry.kurochkin@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi all.

I want a handler to render different templates for different languages.
I have getCurrentLanguage function and now I try to do something like:

   getRootR = do
       currentLanguage <- getCurrentLanguage
       defaultLayout $ do
           addWidget $(widgetFile $ currentLanguage ++ "/homepage")

This results in:

   GHC stage restriction: `currentLanguage'
     is used in a top-level splice or annotation,
     and must be imported, not defined locally

This makes sense to me, because TH is calculated at compile time. I
would like to hear ideas how to work around this restriction. Perhaps
there is an existing solution in Yesod?

At the moment, the best I could think of is smth like this:

   getRootR = do
       currentLanguage <- getCurrentLanguage
       defaultLayout $ do
           case currentLanguage of
               "en" -> addWidget $(widgetFile  "en/homepage")
               ... and so on for each language ...

Obviously, this is not a solution taking in account that there are many
languages and many handlers.

I was considering creating a global (template file name -> rendered
template) map. But I am not sure this is really feasible.

Regards,
 Dmitry

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