Key shown when not in other locale

[thenitai]

Hi,

ExpressJS and Jade here. Using your fine library but running into an issue when changing locale. That is, that the key is being shown instead of the default locale (english in my case).

en.json contains this:

"select_language" : "Select language"

de.json does NOT contain it at all and what we see instead of "Select language" is the "select_language".

Using 0.4.1 (the one that comes by default when doing a npm install i18n)

Thanks for the feedback.

Kind Regards,
Nitai

[mashpie]

Hey :)

in short: this is intended. Let me explain what happens:

by default i18n will return the "key" as is, as long there is no translation found for current language. The key itself is intended to be an expression like "please translate me" and will get returned until finally translated.

2nd thing is determining languages: i18n determines them by req headers in several ways. DefaultLanguage only get's set when req doesn't provide one of the configured languages, no matter of status of their underlying translations.

So in your case, i18n won't switch to DefaultLanguage but will try to translate that term in current language, without finding that translated term.

That behavior is borrowed from different gettext implementations where you start working with terms in a default language (mostly en), and will add i18n later by simply adding some i18n files. So i18n should return the given key as kind of "default term".

I am just thinking about a config switch to fallback to defaultLanguage on empty terms... should work, just needs some time + testing :)

[thenitai]

Thank you for your explanations. Coming from, say Java .properties files, the default behaviour is to fall back to English translation and show the English translated text, if the key could not be found in the current locale.

This makes totally sense, especially in a production environment. There you usually don't want that customers see a message like "please translate me". Say, I'm in German and instead of "Bitte wählen Sie eine Sprache" I see a "select_locals" (if that would be my key). I don't think that goes down well.

(Just a view of someone who has deployed a couple of applications) :-)

According to your answer above, you say that if I don't set any languages in the config, this behaviour will change? If you need someone to test, please call on me.

Thank you for all your work and time. Much appreciated.

[mashpie]

both scenarios have their pros and cons (actually I do use both depending on use case, for more than 15years now). OK no need to discuss as there is a solution: implementing a config switch, which could even be env depended. that way you can condigure to get untranslated terms on dev and foreign language terms on prod...

[thenitai]

Yes a config setting would be awesome. Thank you for making an awesome library even better :-)

[dirwin517]

👍 A config Setting for 'partial' fallback!

[pedrodelgallego]

+1

[rkorach]

+1 for having a fallback system between supported locales if keys in one locale is only partially translated.

I've seen this has been also discussed on 18n-node-2 : jeresig#29

[mashpie]

well fallbacks are in for a while now, see https://github.com/mashpie/i18n-node/blob/master/test/i18n.fallbacks.js and https://github.com/mashpie/i18n-node#list-of-all-configuration-options

anything still missing for you?

[rkorach]

Sorry, I may have understood it wrong.

The way I understand the doc

• if the user locale is not in the declared locales it automatically fallbacks to the defaultLocale
• with the fallback config parameter, you can force a user (unsupported) locale to fallback to one of the declared locales, different from the defaultLocale

What I am looking for - maybe 'fallback' wasn't a good term to use

• I declare 3 locales, and always force one of these locales, (say [en, fr, de], with fr as default)
• if one key is translated in 'fr' and 'en', but not in 'de', currently the german user will see the key displayed. I'd like i18n to display the 'en' translation if german translation not ready.

I couldn't manage to make this work, but let me know if I got everything wrong I'll try that once again.