Cake has a wonderful shell script function built into it called extract that will run through your code and create a .po file full of all of the text contained within your __('My text here') calls. You can then pass these files onto to translators to modify them for your languages. When you want to add variables though, you have to break it up into pieces which may change the context of the phrase. Here's a way around that.
// Share.on([hacker news,
linkedin,
twitter,
facebook,
reddit])
Normally you'd do something like this:
Which will provide you a snippet of 'My friend ' and ' enjoys writing code.' in your .po file. In a case where the context of the entire phrase might matter, a translator will only get the small pieces rather than the entire phrase. They aren't going to see how it's spliced together in your application, only the individual parts.
We can solve that with the Cake's extremely handy String::insert() method which allows for easy descriptive templating like this:
And then finally make it play nice with extract like this:
You only need to make translators aware that they should not modify words with a colon prefix and then you'll get something that gives them context to what is being said in your .po file. Now they'll only see this:
"My friend :friend_name enjoys writing code."
This article has been published at The Bakery.
// Share.on([hacker news,
linkedin,
twitter,
facebook,
reddit])