Question

A while back I was reading the W3C article on ‘Re-using Strings in Scripted Content‘, which contains some useful advice on internationalisation, but which strikes me as at odds iwth the DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself) principle of eliminating repetitive code.

To take their example, we might have some code like this…

print 'The printer is '; if (printer.working) {     print 'on.\n'; } else {     print 'off.\n'; }  print 'The stapler is '; if (stapler.working) {     print 'on.\n'; } else {     print 'off.\n'; } 

My instinct would be to eliminate the repetition roughly as follows…

report-state(printer, 'printer'); report-state(stapler, 'stapler');  function report-state(name, object) {     print 'The '+name+' is ';     if (object.working) {         print 'on\n';     } else {         print 'off\n';     } } 

…but doing so would cause a difficulty in the code if we needed to localise it to Spanish because the word for ‘on’ is apparently different in those two cases.

So, I guess my question is, how have other developers approached balancing the DRY principle with internationalisation of their code?

Part of me wants to argue that internationalisation is one of those extreme programming “you arent gonna need it” situations. On the flip side however, refactoring with the DRY principle in mind is supposed to balance this by making it easy to implement functionality as it’s required, not harder as it does here.

Answer 1

I’d try to keep complete sentences in the language resource. As you said you might need different words in different contexts. But a bigger problem is that the order of sentences might be different in different languages. So building up strings from words can cause problems.

Just store

The printer is on The printer is off The stapler is on The stapler is off 

in the language resource for every language. The repetition here is less of a maintenance headache than trying to figure out where all the single words are going to pop up in your application.