Default Translation language - howto?

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Mario

postedon November 12, 2013at 2:15 PM

Hi all,
I'm working on a PoC platform where many LABELs have already been defined only in english, i.e. there's no translation for de, fr and it languages.
A user with de language preference is actually seeing a string like "[LABEL:text.label.here]" for each label that's not translated in that language.

Is there a way to define a fall-back-language in case the translation for a label in the specific user language is missing?

As an example, consider the labels defined as follows:

1[LABEL:say.hello] := {en:'Hello', de:'Hoi'}
2[LABEL:say.goodbye] := {en:'Goodbye', de:''}

The result of the function TRANSLATE currently returned is :

1TRANSLATE('[LABEL:say.hello]', 'en') = 'Hello';
2TRANSLATE('[LABEL:say.hello]', 'de') = 'Hoi';
3TRANSLATE('[LABEL:say.goodbye]', 'en') = 'Goodbye';
4TRANSLATE('[LABEL:say.goodbye]', 'de') = '[LABEL:say.goodbye\|de]';

What I'm looking for is to somewhere set a property in the backendConfiguration like 'defaultLanguage= en' that make function TRANSLATE to return:

1TRANSLATE('[LABEL:say.goodbye]', 'de') = 'Goodbye';

Mario

repliedon November 13, 2013at 11:45 AM

Hi Mauro,
thanks for your answer, the Language Priority document is clearly explaining how the translation language is choosen.

I was actually looking for a different information, that seems not to be covered by the document.

Let's assume the language is explicitly defined to de via the highest priority configuration (query parameter) and let's take the example initially described.
If de translation of [LABEL:say.goodbye] is missing, we would see the text [LABEL:say.goodbye] on the browser screen.
I would like to avoid displaying that text (is quite annoying and could even look like an error if by chance the end user see it) when the de translation for the single label is missing BUT a default language (en) for that label is provided.
It would be great if Appway would take care to fall-back to a default translation language in such missing-label-translation cases.
Is such a feature available in Appway?

Stephan

repliedon November 13, 2013at 12:56 PM

Hi Mario,

There is only a very limited fallback mechanism for missing label translations. Starting with Appway 5.2, you can create language business objects which use Java locale codes as ids, e.g. "en_US" or "de_CH". If "en_US" is selected as translation language and a label does not contain a translation for this language, Appway removes the country code and checks if there is a translation for the language "en". This feature allows you to provide a complete translation for English ("en") and specify exceptions for Britisch English ("en_UK").

But there is no fallback from one "primary" language to another, e.g. from German ("de") to English ("en"). We have been discussing this in the past and came to the decision that we do not want to implement such a fallback. The main reason is that a page with a mix of languages is a bad user experience. We want to "force" users to provide translations for all languages.

- Stephan

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