5 ms·

Localization in .NET console and desktop apps

81 points by svantex 2y ago

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
morning4coffe 2y ago
[flagged]
- svantex 2y ago
  Thanks. Yes, I looked at AvaloniaUI, Uno, Xwt, and MAUI before finally deciding on AvaloniaUI. It's not been entirely frictionless, there are some glaring omissions, the documentation is not great and the learning threshold if you're not really good with WPF is pretty high. Still, it does work, and I have the app running on Windows, Linux and macOS with very, very little platform specific code.
kevingadd 2y ago
It still frustrates me that there's no built in gettext-style affordances for C#. I guess it doesn't fit the way people typically build software in .NET. IMO the result is that it's more work to localize your software, so a lot of software that should get localized doesn't. I built a gettext-style system for my own software, so I feel like it's possible to do. But the gap between that and making something everyone can use is pretty big.
- gwervc 2y ago
  It's even more a mess when doing multi-platform. I've a Monogame Android prototype build of my game and somehow the .NET localization throws me exception at runtime. So it's easier to implement a service that load and handle localization than relying on supposed built-in mechanism.
- pjc50 2y ago
  You're "supposed to" use string resources. There's support for having a different resource pack per languages. It's not exactly frictionless, though. (With the new "source generator" work it should be relatively straightforward to implement a gettext-style source scan if that's what you want.)
  - svantex 2y ago
    There's nothing wrong with the .NET resource system with culture-specific satellite assemblies etc as such. The bigger problem I see is lack of tooling and services for translation by non-developers, volunteers, professional translation bureaus etc. You can't expect them to fire up Visual Studio, clone your repo and start editing resx files. Especially as there's not even a translation view! With .po files, there's a ton of editors, online services, translators etc available.
    - radnor 2y ago
      At a previous job we utilized https://webtranslateit.com/ https://webtranslateit.com/ - it organized everything easily for volunteers to provide translations for all resx strings.
      - svantex 2y ago
        Nice, but perhaps a little pricy for small startups. That's actually one of the things I didn't emphasize perhaps. Not only is the gettext/.po eco system big, there's also a lot of free or relatively low cost services available.
    - ygra 2y ago
      > there's not even a translation view With Windows Forms, at least back in the day, you could open a Form in the designer, change its language to something else and just edit text on the controls (or images, etc.). The changes would go into a resx file for the selected language. At first glance this looked quite cool, but on the other hand, translators now can ruin your UI, as there's not really a dedicated translation view that only allows to change resources ...
theolivenbaum 2y ago
We've been using a library called TNT for this job and are quite happy with the flow: https://github.com/pragmatrix/tnt https://github.com/pragmatrix/tnt You basically annotate all your strings with a "my string".t() or t($"my interpolated string: {var}") and then use their CLI to extract the strings to be translated. It even includes google translation API support for you to kickstart the process.
- svantex 2y ago
  Nice, very ambitious! I like the twist to extract from the compiled IL code, much easier, more stable and reliable than parsing the source. My one gripe here is that the code does not follow the .NET paradigm of using resources at all. Still, very clever and a lot of functionality.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
ammo1662 2y ago
I remembered the last time I checked, the code page does not even follow the standards (maybe the Shift JIS). Some of the characters are missing in that character set. Hope they can just use iconv directly.
tracker1 2y ago
I've home grown a solution for this a couple times... directories of yaml files, where the default is en-US (for those I've worked on). The main set(s) of yaml files are built to path.filename as a prefix to the internal structure in the file... then typescript type(s) are generated from that... with other files then built and assigned the default type as the type. Then checks for errors are run. From there, code generation for server-side usage is done. It's tended to work relatively well for me.
svantex 2y ago
Thanks for all the feedback! The real issue that is not handled by several suggested alternatives is how to actually manage the translation process. resx files as such work fine - but... the problem is getting them from non-technical translators, possibly with their own tool preferences, or volunteers not having any tools or particular tech skills at all. That's what I'm trying to find a better way for, while still not breaking .NET practices.
- tuwtuwtuwtuw 2y ago
  Considering resx has been supported for decades, why not just convert the resx into whatever the translator team wants? Reading/writing resx is 10 lines of code or something. I just dump ours into an excelsheet with one column per language, because for whatever reason the translators wants it in excel like that. Then when they are done I convert it back to resx files.
  - svantex 2y ago
    In my case there's no "translator team" as such. It's a mix of volunteers, part-time paid translators, colleagues etc. I've never had a translator team, it's always various ad-hoc situations and networks of people. And I don't want to write and maintain conversion software and such workflows.
- ComputerGuru 2y ago
  You can see my top-level comment for more info, but we wrote a very quick and dirty UI to manage the XML localizations that allows "forking" a language into a new localization and showing outdated or missing localization strings. I don't think a single person that contributed a translation was actually a developer, but I've had no complaints about it being difficult to follow in the going-on-twenty-years since its release! https://neosmart.net/forums/threads/translations-to-other-languages.696/ https://neosmart.net/forums/threads/translations-to-other-la...
  - svantex 2y ago
    Nice - but very special purpose from what I can gather. I've done a few custom solutions myself over the years, but that's exactly what I'm trying to get away from. I want to write code that does cool stuff for the users of my apps, not code that does cool stuff to make translations possible - someone else can do that cool stuff ;-) where I'm the "user".
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
ComputerGuru 2y ago
We came up with our own localization framework back in the .NET 2.0 days and we're still using it. Version-numbered translations in an XML file with a simple GUI to show missing translations, flag out-dated translations, etc. The framework and UI: https://github.com/neosmart/Localization https://github.com/neosmart/Localization Sample translations: https://github.com/neosmart/easybcd-localization https://github.com/neosmart/easybcd-localization Guide and screenshots (that should have probably be also folded into the non-existent readme for the localization toolkit repo): https://neosmart.net/forums/threads/translations-to-other-languages.696/ https://neosmart.net/forums/threads/translations-to-other-la... XML is a drag, but JSON isn't supported without a dependency under .NET Framework and the single-binary NLTUI app masks that from most users. XML also gives nice schema validation, for example look at how simple the validation is in the github action ci for the real-world app example from above: https://github.com/neosmart/EasyBCD-Localization/blob/master/validate.sh https://github.com/neosmart/EasyBCD-Localization/blob/master...
sandreas 2y ago
I wonder why translations always tend to need an extra format or framework. Is replacing or customizing translation files after deployment a thing or could it be just (generated) compile time CODE in the used language based on a simple common format (like gettext with macros)? I did A LOT of translation work and in the end the best, easiest and fastest solution always was a list / map of key value pairs, where key was a unique translation identifier and the value was the translation in one language optionally having placeholders (e.g. for numbers) combined with a simple macro (best case) / function / method similar to sprintf. Even plural forms should get their own unique identifier - automatic pluralization always failed for my use cases (russian has several different plural forms depending on the context).
- svantex 2y ago
  Quite so, and in the case of resx, that's exactly what you're getting. A list of key-value-pairs, no support for pluralisation either (as you say, it gets hard. I understand Polish for example is very complex, perhaps Russian is the same?). I never had a problem with resx and .net satellite assemblies and all that as far as the format goes. But it's always been an issue how to involved translators in a way that's both simple for the translators, safe for the quality and as automated as possible in bringing the translations back to the app.
  - sandreas 2y ago
    That may be the case, but resx is a quite bloated XML format for a simple key value pair listing. Besides that, resx is yet another format for the same thing. I think the solution is quite simple: - One unified key value pair format (for translators and GUI tools) - One intermediate format that is programming language specific (it could be generated code or highly integrated formats like resx) - A simple tool that can transliterate between those two formats Workflow example: - Export a unified format file from resx with placeholders for the translations - Translators: Here you go, use your GUI tools on this - Get back the translated unified format - Import a unified format file to resx
    - 2y ago
sasakrsmanovic2 2y ago
Unclear to me where this app runs as far as deskop goes? Persumably windows, so is there not a way to reuse winui localization via WinAppsSDK https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/apps/winui/winui3/localize-winui3-app https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/apps/winui/winui3/...
- svantex 2y ago
  If you're referring to my app, Xecrets Ez ( https://www.axantum.com/ https://www.axantum.com/ ), it runs in Windows, macOS and Linux. As mentioned, the issue I'm trying to solve is not the code end. Resx works fine once it's there. It's the translator end. How to present the texts and translations and context etc to the human, often non-technical, translators and often many and one translator might only translate a few strings, then another one etc. So it has to be real easy to use and gain access to. Can't for example ask them to install a piece of software. Finally, once a text has been translated, how to get it back to the app as easy and preferably as automated as possible.

81 points by svantex 2y ago

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

morning4coffe 2y ago

[flagged]

svantex 2y ago
Thanks. Yes, I looked at AvaloniaUI, Uno, Xwt, and MAUI before finally deciding on AvaloniaUI. It's not been entirely frictionless, there are some glaring omissions, the documentation is not great and the learning threshold if you're not really good with WPF is pretty high. Still, it does work, and I have the app running on Windows, Linux and macOS with very, very little platform specific code.

kevingadd 2y ago

It still frustrates me that there's no built in gettext-style affordances for C#. I guess it doesn't fit the way people typically build software in .NET. IMO the result is that it's more work to localize your software, so a lot of software that should get localized doesn't. I built a gettext-style system for my own software, so I feel like it's possible to do. But the gap between that and making something everyone can use is pretty big.

gwervc 2y ago
It's even more a mess when doing multi-platform. I've a Monogame Android prototype build of my game and somehow the .NET localization throws me exception at runtime. So it's easier to implement a service that load and handle localization than relying on supposed built-in mechanism.
pjc50 2y ago
You're "supposed to" use string resources. There's support for having a different resource pack per languages. It's not exactly frictionless, though. (With the new "source generator" work it should be relatively straightforward to implement a gettext-style source scan if that's what you want.)
- svantex 2y ago
  There's nothing wrong with the .NET resource system with culture-specific satellite assemblies etc as such. The bigger problem I see is lack of tooling and services for translation by non-developers, volunteers, professional translation bureaus etc. You can't expect them to fire up Visual Studio, clone your repo and start editing resx files. Especially as there's not even a translation view! With .po files, there's a ton of editors, online services, translators etc available.
  - radnor 2y ago
    At a previous job we utilized https://webtranslateit.com/ https://webtranslateit.com/ - it organized everything easily for volunteers to provide translations for all resx strings.
    - svantex 2y ago
      Nice, but perhaps a little pricy for small startups. That's actually one of the things I didn't emphasize perhaps. Not only is the gettext/.po eco system big, there's also a lot of free or relatively low cost services available.
  - ygra 2y ago
    > there's not even a translation view With Windows Forms, at least back in the day, you could open a Form in the designer, change its language to something else and just edit text on the controls (or images, etc.). The changes would go into a resx file for the selected language. At first glance this looked quite cool, but on the other hand, translators now can ruin your UI, as there's not really a dedicated translation view that only allows to change resources ...

theolivenbaum 2y ago

We've been using a library called TNT for this job and are quite happy with the flow: https://github.com/pragmatrix/tnt https://github.com/pragmatrix/tnt You basically annotate all your strings with a "my string".t() or t($"my interpolated string: {var}") and then use their CLI to extract the strings to be translated. It even includes google translation API support for you to kickstart the process.

svantex 2y ago
Nice, very ambitious! I like the twist to extract from the compiled IL code, much easier, more stable and reliable than parsing the source. My one gripe here is that the code does not follow the .NET paradigm of using resources at all. Still, very clever and a lot of functionality.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

ammo1662 2y ago

I remembered the last time I checked, the code page does not even follow the standards (maybe the Shift JIS). Some of the characters are missing in that character set. Hope they can just use iconv directly.

tracker1 2y ago

I've home grown a solution for this a couple times... directories of yaml files, where the default is en-US (for those I've worked on). The main set(s) of yaml files are built to path.filename as a prefix to the internal structure in the file... then typescript type(s) are generated from that... with other files then built and assigned the default type as the type. Then checks for errors are run. From there, code generation for server-side usage is done. It's tended to work relatively well for me.

svantex 2y ago

Thanks for all the feedback! The real issue that is not handled by several suggested alternatives is how to actually manage the translation process. resx files as such work fine - but... the problem is getting them from non-technical translators, possibly with their own tool preferences, or volunteers not having any tools or particular tech skills at all. That's what I'm trying to find a better way for, while still not breaking .NET practices.

tuwtuwtuwtuw 2y ago
Considering resx has been supported for decades, why not just convert the resx into whatever the translator team wants? Reading/writing resx is 10 lines of code or something. I just dump ours into an excelsheet with one column per language, because for whatever reason the translators wants it in excel like that. Then when they are done I convert it back to resx files.
- svantex 2y ago
  In my case there's no "translator team" as such. It's a mix of volunteers, part-time paid translators, colleagues etc. I've never had a translator team, it's always various ad-hoc situations and networks of people. And I don't want to write and maintain conversion software and such workflows.
ComputerGuru 2y ago
You can see my top-level comment for more info, but we wrote a very quick and dirty UI to manage the XML localizations that allows "forking" a language into a new localization and showing outdated or missing localization strings. I don't think a single person that contributed a translation was actually a developer, but I've had no complaints about it being difficult to follow in the going-on-twenty-years since its release! https://neosmart.net/forums/threads/translations-to-other-languages.696/ https://neosmart.net/forums/threads/translations-to-other-la...
- svantex 2y ago
  Nice - but very special purpose from what I can gather. I've done a few custom solutions myself over the years, but that's exactly what I'm trying to get away from. I want to write code that does cool stuff for the users of my apps, not code that does cool stuff to make translations possible - someone else can do that cool stuff ;-) where I'm the "user".

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

ComputerGuru 2y ago

We came up with our own localization framework back in the .NET 2.0 days and we're still using it. Version-numbered translations in an XML file with a simple GUI to show missing translations, flag out-dated translations, etc. The framework and UI: https://github.com/neosmart/Localization https://github.com/neosmart/Localization Sample translations: https://github.com/neosmart/easybcd-localization https://github.com/neosmart/easybcd-localization Guide and screenshots (that should have probably be also folded into the non-existent readme for the localization toolkit repo): https://neosmart.net/forums/threads/translations-to-other-languages.696/ https://neosmart.net/forums/threads/translations-to-other-la... XML is a drag, but JSON isn't supported without a dependency under .NET Framework and the single-binary NLTUI app masks that from most users. XML also gives nice schema validation, for example look at how simple the validation is in the github action ci for the real-world app example from above: https://github.com/neosmart/EasyBCD-Localization/blob/master/validate.sh https://github.com/neosmart/EasyBCD-Localization/blob/master...

sandreas 2y ago

I wonder why translations always tend to need an extra format or framework. Is replacing or customizing translation files after deployment a thing or could it be just (generated) compile time CODE in the used language based on a simple common format (like gettext with macros)? I did A LOT of translation work and in the end the best, easiest and fastest solution always was a list / map of key value pairs, where key was a unique translation identifier and the value was the translation in one language optionally having placeholders (e.g. for numbers) combined with a simple macro (best case) / function / method similar to sprintf. Even plural forms should get their own unique identifier - automatic pluralization always failed for my use cases (russian has several different plural forms depending on the context).

svantex 2y ago
Quite so, and in the case of resx, that's exactly what you're getting. A list of key-value-pairs, no support for pluralisation either (as you say, it gets hard. I understand Polish for example is very complex, perhaps Russian is the same?). I never had a problem with resx and .net satellite assemblies and all that as far as the format goes. But it's always been an issue how to involved translators in a way that's both simple for the translators, safe for the quality and as automated as possible in bringing the translations back to the app.
- sandreas 2y ago
  That may be the case, but resx is a quite bloated XML format for a simple key value pair listing. Besides that, resx is yet another format for the same thing. I think the solution is quite simple: - One unified key value pair format (for translators and GUI tools) - One intermediate format that is programming language specific (it could be generated code or highly integrated formats like resx) - A simple tool that can transliterate between those two formats Workflow example: - Export a unified format file from resx with placeholders for the translations - Translators: Here you go, use your GUI tools on this - Get back the translated unified format - Import a unified format file to resx
  - 2y ago

sasakrsmanovic2 2y ago

Unclear to me where this app runs as far as deskop goes? Persumably windows, so is there not a way to reuse winui localization via WinAppsSDK https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/apps/winui/winui3/localize-winui3-app https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/apps/winui/winui3/...

svantex 2y ago
If you're referring to my app, Xecrets Ez ( https://www.axantum.com/ https://www.axantum.com/ ), it runs in Windows, macOS and Linux. As mentioned, the issue I'm trying to solve is not the code end. Resx works fine once it's there. It's the translator end. How to present the texts and translations and context etc to the human, often non-technical, translators and often many and one translator might only translate a few strings, then another one etc. So it has to be real easy to use and gain access to. Can't for example ask them to install a piece of software. Finally, once a text has been translated, how to get it back to the app as easy and preferably as automated as possible.